I am pleased to introduce this first annual report of the Information Technology Laboratory (ITL), NIST's newest laboratory organization. NIST provides key elements of the technical infrastructure that enable many industries, including manufacturing, electronics, building, chemical, and information technology, to overcome the barriers to better, faster, and less expensive products. The ITL was formed in 1996 to carry out the NIST mission of promoting U.S. economic growth by working with industry to develop and apply technology, measurements, and standards for information technology.

The new ITL combines and expands the roles of two previous NIST laboratories: the Computer Systems Laboratory and the Computing and Applied Mathematics Laboratory. This new organizational structure enables us to be more responsive to industry and user needs and to be a strong, effective member of the NIST family.

Our program of work concentrates on developing tests and measurement methods, reference data, proof-of-concept implementations, and technical analyses that help to advance the development and use of new information technology. An important aspect is our computational sciences work which focuses on developing the methods and tools needed to formulate and solve difficult mathematical, statistical, and computational problems. ITL's applied mathematicians and statisticians collaborate with their NIST colleagues and industry partners in developing experiment designs and models that help scientists, engineers, and managers work more productively, analyze data more effectively, and understand complex processes. We are also developing test data and reference software to help developers improve the quality of their software. We continue to serve other agencies of the federal government, particularly in computer security, and we continue to help NIST staff members use up-to-date information technology services effectively.

Managing Change

Information technology is a dynamic technology that has sparked the development of many new products and services. Information technology systems are widely distributed throughout the world, and used in almost all businesses and all areas of human endeavor. In just the last few years, tens of millions of people have started to access information across the world through computer networks.

Despite the pervasiveness of information technology in many activities, there are still many barriers to its effective development and use. Information technology encompasses several industry sectors whose boundaries are not rigid, including telecommunications, computing, and consumer electronics, but whose products are expected to be integrated into seamless information networks of the future.

It is not always easy for information technology users to change old ways of doing business or to adapt new methods on a broad scale. Security and interoperability are not guaranteed when new systems are acquired. To exploit the full potential of information technology in the future, it is important to overcome these barriers and to make systems more interoperable, easily usable, scalable, and secure than they are today.

Tests for Information Technology

NIST has traditionally applied its special proficiencies in measurement to developing impartial, neutral, objective tests for physical and chemical properties, and these tests have helped many technology areas to advance. ITL is challenged to bring its expertise to bear on improving the measurement of information technology. In the past, we have had some success in the measurement of the performance of hardware, but test and measurement of software quality are not well understood. The many combinations and possibilities of software lead to unforeseen outcomes and uncertain results.

In this report, you will find summaries of projects to develop tests to accelerate the development of quality products, as well as high-quality, precise advanced standards, early in their development cycles. A few examples include:

Human-machine interface technologies:

• We have developed reference data and benchmark tests to improve the performance of speech recognition systems and enable people to acquire reliable systems that use voice commands for interacting with computers.

• Oher reference data sets, evaluation software and proof-of-concept implementations help developers and users of systems that process visual images. Our tools have helped people to evaluate systems used in optical character recognition, fingerprint classification, and face recognition systems.

• Working with government, industry, and academic organizations, we have had a role in improving the accuracy and efficiency of electronic text search and retrieval technology. As the sponsor of the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC), we have been successful in encouraging participants to exchange research results and to transfer new technology from the laboratory into commercial systems.

Tests developed for standards:

• Computer Graphics Metafile (CGM) implementations are being used by the Air Transport Association (ATA) and Aerospace Industries Association (AIA) to test the ability of CGM software to exchange graphics data.

• We have started the development of tests for the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) to support a forward-looking standard specification developed by the VRML community. We expect that these tests will be used by industry on a voluntary basis early in the development of VRML products.

• Methods developed for evaluating the interoperability of text, graphics, and video applications over Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) networks support the standards activities of the ATM Forum, an industry consortium.

• We are working with the Digital Audio Visual Council (DAVIC), an international consortium for the emerging digital audio-visual applications and services, to develop interoperability tests for digital video products conforming to DAVIC specifications.

Software tools:

• We began distributing S-CHECK (Sensitivity Checker), a portable, scalable tool that we developed for assaying and improving the performances of complex programs. The tool is especially suited for code on parallel systems, where code interactions are common but difficult to evaluate and architectures vary.

Security methods:

• Our proof-of-concept implementation for Role Based Access Control (RBAC) for the World Wide Web provides a tested method of security to limit access to information based on the user's need and the user's role in the organization. These proof-of-concept implementations help product developers by providing software that implements the functions of specifications and augments the written descriptions.

Computational sciences tools:

• Reference data sets are being developed to assure that mathematical and statistical software products are producing accurate results. Developers and users alike will benefit from the reduction of errors and the increased confidence provided.

• Our Guide to Available Mathematical Software provides scientists and engineers with easy access to a large repository of mathematical and statistical software components for use in modeling and analysis projects.

Our Role in Standards

Those familiar with NIST's past information technology activities will remember our work in formal standards organizations and our role in the development of Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS). To carry out our new agenda for forward-looking standards, we reviewed our standards support activities and reduced efforts in older areas of technology. We continue to support the development of standards, especially in areas where standards will promote international trade and economic growth, and we support the management of the standards process within national and international formal standards-developing groups. We are also working with informal standards groups including industry consortia and professional societies that are developing specifications in advance of the formal standards process.

Previously NIST issued FIPS that adopted voluntary industry standards for federal government use. Agencies are now being directed to use voluntary industry standards as a result of new legislation (Public Law 104-113), thus diminishing the need for FIPS that duplicate voluntary industry standards. We will issue FIPS only where there are compelling federal government requirements. We are reviewing the FIPS that have been issued to assure that the standards are necessary, adequate, and current.

By focusing on tests for forward-looking standards, we believe that we will serve our federal colleagues by improving the quality, at an early stage of development, of the information technology products that they acquire. We are strengthening our technical assistance to users through increased dissemination of electronic information about available standards. We are also planning more extensive help for federal agencies and others in finding and using industry's information technology standards, including the network services being developed by industry to identify standards.

For More Information

I encourage you to explore our Web pages to find out more about our activities; the address is http://www.itl.nist.gov. If you find areas that would be useful in your organization or business, please contact the project leader, group manager, or division chief. We have many ways that we can work with you, and we welcome your inquiries.

Shukri A. Wakid, Director
Information Technology Laboratory
Email: itlab@nist.gov

OVERVIEW OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY LABORATORY

MATHEMATICAL AND COMPUTATIONAL SCIENCES DIVISION

ADVANCED NETWORK TECHNOLOGIES DIVISION

COMPUTER SECURITY DIVISION

INFORMATION ACCESS AND USER INTERFACES DIVISION

HIGH PERFORMANCE SYSTEMS AND SERVICES DIVISION

DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING AND INFORMATION SERVICES DIVISION

SOFTWARE DIAGNOSTICS AND CONFORMANCE TESTING DIVISION

STATISTICAL ENGINEERING DIVISION

INTERACTIONS AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Selected Staff Accomplishments

Participation in Voluntary Standards Activities

Industry Interactions

Selected Collaborations

Cooperative Research and Development Agreements

Guest Researchers

International Activities

Patents

Publications

Technical Papers

Conferences, Workshops, Lectures, and Training Courses

Electronic Products and Resources

OVERVIEW OF THE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY LABORATORY

Information technology (IT) impacts all areas of American life. Within the U.S. economy, about 60 percent of our workers have jobs which depend on the information they generate and receive on advanced information networks. IT has become an essential business tool and has revolutionized the way we conduct the nation's business within the global marketplace. As an enabling technology, IT has become embedded in our household products, entertainment media, and communication networks. While enjoying its many benefits, consumers are challenged to implement and use the ever-changing information technology effectively.

Our New Focus

The goal of ITL's program is to stimulate the growth and adoption of new technology by helping industry develop better, higher-quality products and helping users evaluate these products. ITL provides key elements of the technical infrastructure to meet industry needs for measurement and standards. Neutral, objective tests are needed to measure interoperability, usability, scalability, and security of systems and to facilitate the implementation of industry-set standards.

Partnership with Industry

An important mechanism for interactions with industry organizations and federal agencies is the Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA). In 1996, we collaborated with 53 government, industry, and academic institutions through CRADAs to pursue common goals. ITL contributed to the activities of industry groups such as the ATM Forum, the Digital Audio Visual Council (DAVIC), and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to support interoperability and forward-looking standards. Our ongoing workshop efforts continued -- the North American Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) Users' Forum (NIUF) and the Federal Wireless Users' Forum (FWUF). Many other informal interactions with government and industry partners involved the sharing of equipment or expertise. These cooperative arrangements benefit all participants through a better understanding of the advantages and barriers to the development and use of information technology.

Our commitment to serving other federal agencies remains strong. Our tests and test methods benefit federal as well as industry customers. Particularly in the area of information security, ITL plays a key role, under the Computer Security Act of 1987, in developing standards and guidelines, and in providing technical assistance to federal departments and agencies in securing their automated information resources.

Office of Federal and Industry Relations

ITL continued its support of the Committee on Applications and Technology (CAT) of the President's Information Infrastructure Task Force (IITF). We conducted meetings of the CAT, participated in IITF functions, and assisted the working groups in making their documents available to the public for review. Other activities include maintaining, updating, and revising the NII Virtual Library, developing and maintaining the CAT Web site to make committee and working group information available to the public, and responding to queries about the NII and GII.

In October 1996, ITL cosponsored the Leveraging Cyberspace Conference with the White House and Xerox PARC in Palo Alto, California. We provided technical coordination and established a Web site for the conference. Registration information, conference papers, and comments on those papers were submitted and posted electronically.

Our Organizational Resources

Funding for ITL programs in FY 1996 consisted of $43.7 million from the NIST Congressional appropriation (STRS), including $11.6 million for the Consolidated Scientific Computing System (Super Computer) and $0.5 million for Technical Competence; $1.7 million from the Advanced Technology Program; and $14.8 million in reimbursable funds, mostly from other federal agencies for direct technical assistance. See the Interactions and Accomplishments section of this report for a complete list of our collaborative interactions.

Our Information Resources

We welcome your interest in our organization and invite you to visit our Web site at:

http://www.itl.nist.gov

Highlights of our major technical units follow.

MATHEMATICAL AND COMPUTATIONAL SCIENCES DIVISION

The Mathematical and Computational Sciences Division provides technical leadership within NIST in modern analytical and computational methods for solving mathematical problems of interest to American industry. This mission is discharged through a program of research and collaboration with technical experts in other NIST divisions, industry, and academia. The scope includes the development and analysis of theoretical descriptions of phenomena (mathematical modeling); the design and analysis of requisite computational methods and experiments; the transformation of these methods into efficient numerical algorithms for high performance computers; the implementation of these methods in high-quality mathematical software; and the distribution of this software to potential clients, both within NIST and to the external community.

The work of the Division is organized into three broad areas: modeling in the physical sciences; software infrastructure for computational science; and compression algorithms.

Mathematical Modeling

The customers for our work include our collaborating NIST scientists and engineers, and through these collaborators, industrial scientists and engineers; other customers are the larger community of researchers in computational science and engineering. Our aim is to work on a spectrum of tasks, including engineering and advanced development, and to conduct both short- and long-term research.

Computational materials science continues to be a major thrust of our efforts. Materials science is one of NIST's major areas of expertise, covering a broad range of theoretical, experimental, and computational activities. Long-term mathematical modeling tasks with applications to problems in materials science have been under way by several Division staff members for a number of years; other tasks are relatively new. Notable are long-term efforts in diffuse-interface methods for modeling crystal growth and newer efforts in modeling composite materials and liquid crystals.

We continue to broaden our efforts and to couple more closely with industry. Significant examples include several efforts in modeling the manufacturing process, new work in modeling lasers for use in collision avoidance, and work in using acoustic emissions to diagnose defects in materials.

Software Infrastructure

We initiated a new joint project with the Statistical Engineering Division on Tools for Evaluating Mathematical and Statistical Software. Particular tasks in the areas of numerical linear algebra, special function evaluation, and statistical software are in process. The Matrix Market, a visual database of test data for large sparse matrix algorithms, is the first visible output of this project. The database has already generated positive feedback on its usefulness to the research community; collaborations began with users of sparse matrix technology, such as the Boeing Company, to include additional large-scale test data in the collection. We also started work on the development of a Web-based software testing service for special functions.

We made significant progress in applying object-oriented software design to improve portability and reuse of mathematical software. Several demonstration software packages for core linear algebra operations in C++ were released and are seeing widespread attention. This work spawned interest in the development of a standardized set of basic linear algebra software for elementary sparse matrix operations. We collaborate with Cray Research on this project.

We initiated several projects to develop algorithms, software, and tools for distributed parallel scientific computing. Our scalar processors algorithms exemplified by our highly successful MGGHAT package, which solves partial differential equations using high order hierarchical-basis adaptive multigrid methods, proved extremely effective. Moving computations such as these to distributed parallel architectures is difficult due to complex load balancing and data communications issues. This year, we completed the prototype of a new software package named PHAML which parallelizes such computations based upon new multigrid-based domain decomposition and refinement-tree-based load balancing strategies. We continued to contribute to the development of software development tools, such as the Parallel Applications Development Environment (PADE), a joint project with the High Performance Systems and Services Division and the NIST Physics Laboratory. We also provided specialized support for use of the IBM SP2 parallel computer with educational materials and utilities such as xllcreate.

The Guide to Available Mathematical Software (GAMS) continues to see high use by the science and engineering community. Since its inception in 1994, the server has satisfied more than three million requests. Digital's AltaVista search engine identifies more than 3,000 external Web pages that link to the GAMS server, and the McKinley Group (a commercial venture that rates Web pages for presentation and content) awarded GAMS its four-star (highest) rating. We investigated new technologies for increasing the usefulness of scientific software repositories, and this year we released a prototype of HotGAMS!, a Java-enabled GAMS client which provides a new interface which is more capable, portable, and efficient.

Compression Algorithms

This year we developed tools for the selection of optimal orthogonal wavelets (biorthogonal wavelet generator), investigated new combinations of known compression techniques (development of code-books applicable to multiple-image classes), and initiated joint inquiries with industrial partners into the services needed to support effective video delivery. Specific topics included adaptations of forward error correction codes that exploit the structure of the encoded video, the fact that the constituent parts of the signal are not equally important, and image estimation techniques to reduce the impact of signal loss.

ADVANCED NETWORK TECHNOLOGIES DIVISION

Information technology trends indicate an ongoing move toward a future of universal, continuous access to information. Three barriers to realizing this future are interoperability problems, scaling problems, and security problems. The Advanced Network Technologies Division concentrates primarily on overcoming the first two barriers and on eliminating their detrimental effect on the development of a global network infrastructure. Our contributions to overcoming these barriers are focused on developing test methods, such as testbeds and reference implementations for interoperability testing, and simulation analysis of protocol interactions and scaling limits. Each group's projects and accomplishments are described below.

High Speed Network Technologies

ATM is not the only high speed technology being developed. The industry standards group IEEE 802.14 is developing protocols for high speed bi-directional data communication over Hybrid Fiber/Coaxial (HFC) networks currently being used or deployed by the Cable TV (CATV) industry. The 802.14 group is working on a draft specification that will include protocols for the Physical Media (PHY) and Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol layers. Many MAC protocol proposals have been submitted to the 802.14 working group by CATV equipment vendors.

As an unbiased third party and at the invitation of the IEEE group, ITL participated in the evaluation of these MAC proposals. Since joining the group in February 1996, we produced five reports to the group based on the results of computer simulations conducted in our laboratory. The subjects of these reports included performance comparison of MAC proposals, analysis of MAC frame formats, comparison of contention resolution algorithms, and evaluation of bandwidth allocation methods. These reports helped the standards group achieve several important agreements in arriving at a final MAC protocol.

A major revolution in information technology is the increased use of integrated services involving voice, data, and video over networks. Digital video applications are expected to be the major sources of network traffic in the future. To foster interoperability of emerging digital video products and services, we developed an interoperability test laboratory that enables vendors to test for interoperability of their products against our standards-conforming implementations as well as products from other vendors.

Video-on-Demand (VoD) service is the first digital video application that we are testing. We developed a prototype VoD system based on the specifications of the Digital Audio Visual Council (DAVIC), an international consortium to develop implementation agreements for digital video applications. We demonstrated the prototype system in the DAVIC interoperability event held in parallel with the 13th DAVIC meeting in New York in June 1996, hosted by Columbia University. A total of eight organizations from Europe, Asia, and North America participated in the event, interconnecting components such as video servers, set-top-units (STUs), and applications over an ATM network. In this event, our VoD system interoperated with systems from NTT and GCL in Japan, CSELT in Italy, and Columbia University. Our efforts continue in two major areas: the development of a VoD reference implementation and the development of a VoD interoperability test suite. The test suite will be submitted to DAVIC for inclusion in its specifications.

Wireless Technologies

Using a voice recognition system, we built a tool to analyze the quality of voice after it has been encoded, transmitted over a wireless system, and decoded. If this technique proves valid, it will be the first automated tool for measuring voice intelligibility. The tool could prove valuable to people developing voice encoding systems or people evaluating the impact of noise on these systems.

Multimedia and Digital Video

In collaboration with MITRE and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), the Group works on the Defense Advanced Research Program Agency (DARPA) Intelligent Collaboration and Visualization Program (IC&V) program. The goal is to identify and apply an evaluation and benchmarking approach to the collaboration infrastructure and applications that will be developed with DARPA funding.

We continued our work with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) recommendations on transmission protocols for multimedia data. These standards deal with transmitting data in various formats (i.e., audio, video, data) in an efficient, secure, and flexible manner. During FY 96, the activity resulted in the development of a convergence layer protocol that supports multicasting and fits between ITU T.120 specifications and the underlying transport protocol.

The Group established a program in multimedia interoperability working with and supporting the International Multimedia Teleconferencing Consortium (IMTC). Initial areas of collaboration included interoperability testing of ITU T.120, "Transmission Protocols for Multipoint Data," and ITU H.324 "Visual Telephone Terminals over GSTN." Other interactions included aiding in the development of an interoperability test management plan and interoperability test suites for both T.120 and H.324, hosting interoperability testing events and vendors in our laboratory facility, providing technical support personnel for testing in the laboratory, aiding in the publishing of testing results, and participating in remote demonstrations by making the laboratory available to IMTC members as a remote site.

Internetworking Technologies

In the area of network security protocol development, staff members took a leadership role in the IETF and vendor community in the design and prototype implementation of internetwork layer security protocols, known as IPSEC. Through a cooperative engineering effort with the National Security Agency (NSA), we developed a very successful public domain reference implementation of the IPSEC protocols for authentication and privacy. The NIST prototype implementation was tested successfully in two public interoperability trials and in numerous bilateral testing sessions with emerging vendor implementations. Through the NSA Technology Transfer Program, the NIST prototype implementation has been distributed to more than 20 organizations in the U.S. and abroad.

In addition to prototype development, ITL contributed to the design of the IETF IPSEC protocol. Two specifications of authentication transforms with replay prevention mechanisms, authored by our staff, are advancing towards Draft Standard status within the IETF.

In the area of integrated services, Division staff contributed to the IETF effort to add support for real-time, quality of service (QoS) controlled capabilities to the existing Internet Protocol Suite (IPS). Our efforts focused on two critical components of this effort: the Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP) and Real Time Transport Protocol (RTP). Division staff constructed a multi-vendor testbed for experimentation with early implementations of RSVP, RTP, and emerging applications demonstrating QoS capabilities. We are also developing test and instrumentation tools to foster experimentation and early deployment of IPS integrated services protocols.

ITL also contributed to the IETF's effort to design and deploy the next generation internetwork protocol: IP version 6 (IPv6). We deployed an advanced multi-vendor testbed facility consisting of very early vendor and academic implementations of IPv6 and supporting network services, tools, and applications. The NIST testbed is a key component in the "6-Bone," an international virtual IPv6 backbone that connects IPv6 testbeds in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. The NIST testbed serves as a primary gateway between U.S. and European components of the 6-Bone. In addition to the testbed activity, we added to the security capabilities of public domain IPv6 implementations.

COMPUTER SECURITY DIVISION

The mission of the Computer Security Division is to ensure the availability of technology and measures to protect information integrity, availability, and confidentiality in computer systems and networks. The success of electronic commerce and the widespread use of the Internet depends to a great extent on the degree to which the users of this information technology can trust it to protect valuable, critical, and confidential information. The goal of ITL's Computer Security program is to meet the security technology, standards, and testing needs of both industry and government. Our Computer Security program has six primary focus areas:

• Cryptographic Technology and Applications - to help establish common cryptographic security technology (algorithms, functionality, and interfaces) to support information technology (IT) systems and networks.
• Advanced Authentication - to develop a common authentication architecture that permits secure (trusted) identification and authentication across networks and systems.
• Public Key Infrastructure - to enable establishment of a nationwide (ultimately, global) infrastructure for managing public key certificates needed to facilitate data integrity, authentication, access control, non-repudiation, and data confidentiality services in global applications.
• Internetworking Security - to ensure that incident prevention, detection, reaction, and information sharing capabilities are embedded in the technical and operational fabric of IT systems and networks.
• Criteria and Assurance - to ensure the availability of affordable, reliable, and trustworthy security technology, systems, and products for use in IT systems and networks.
• Security Management and Support - to provide direct support and other guidance to ensure effective use and management of security technology. Activities include the National Information Systems Security Conference and a number of special projects.

  The following are highlights of the activities and accomplishments of the Computer Security program in FY 1996.

Cryptographic Technology and Applications

In anticipation of future needs for high-quality cryptography, the Division initiated planning in 1996 for the development of new advanced cryptographic algorithm standards, for encryption, digital signatures, and key exchange.

As key escrow program manager, we provided technical oversight of the key production and escrowing process. In accordance with a presidential directive, NIST serves as secretariat for a newly formed Technical Advisory Committee for the development of a Federal Key Management Infrastructure. This advisory committee is designed to obtain private-sector assistance in the development of needed cryptographic key management services for the government.

Advanced Authentication Technology

NIST completed work on a FIPS to provide a standard protocol for the mutual authentication of entities (e.g., users, hosts, servers, etc.) in a network environment. This standard will provide for a higher level of assurance and trust among cooperating entities in the growing global Internet.

Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)

We completed work on the development of digital signature mechanisms (based on the Federal Digital Signature and Secure Hash Algorithms, DSA and SHA) for a NIST Automated Purchase Order System. These mechanisms help ensure the integrity of purchase transactions initiated through the system.

We received funding under the Government Information Technology Services (GITS) innovation fund program to develop a prototype root certificate authority (CA) as a central component in a PKI. This project is scheduled for completion in FY 1997.

Twelve private-sector firms joined ITL in a PKI interoperability effort through the Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) process. The first step in this project was the development, review, and issuance of a Minimum Interoperability Specification for PKI Components, scheduled for completion in early FY 1997.

Internetworking Security

Traditional permission-based and privilege-based access control mechanisms, while relatively simple in principle, are often difficult to implement and maintain in practice, primarily because they focus on the computer system rather on the person and the job to be done. We developed a new type of access control model, based on defining access in terms of the roles to be performed. Role Based Access Control (RBAC) has been demonstrated through a World Wide Web (WWW) proof-of-concept model. Work on the RBAC model will continue in FY 1997.

NIST co-chairs the Privacy and Security Working Group of the Federal Networking Council (FNC), a multi-agency effort to coordinate the Internet research efforts of the federal government community. The Group was awarded a GITS innovation fund grant for a project on Collaborations in Internet Security (CIS). This project will bring together Internet security projects and testbeds from several agencies to facilitate sharing of technologies and effort.

Criteria and Assurance

NIST has been involved in an international effort to develop a set of Common Criteria (CC) for the testing and evaluation of security systems and products. The Common Criteria v1.0 was completed and released for public review. The CC is designed to provide the basis for commercial testing of products and for international mutual recognition of test certifications, thus providing for an expanded market for high-quality, trusted security products and systems.

Security Management and Support

We have been actively involved in the development of computer security incident response capabilities. NIST was one of the founding members of the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST), an international consortium of incident response teams. To further the incident response efforts within the federal government, NIST received a GITS innovation fund grant of $2 million to develop an incident response capability for federal agencies. The effort, named the Federal Computer Incident Response Capability (FedCIRC), will provide incident response services at various levels on a subscription basis for federal agencies.

To provide comprehensive, up-to-date guidance on IT security, NIST issued Special Publication 800-12, Introduction to Computer Security: The NIST Handbook. The handbook provides managers with a cohesive, up-to-date overview of all key aspects of computer security, including basic objectives and controls and references to additional detailed publications and guidance.

As part of its overall effort to provide both general and specific guidance for the protection of computer systems and networks, we developed and issued NIST Special Publication 800- 14, Generally Accepted System Security Principles and Practices (GSSPs). This document provides a high-level set of basic principles (based in part on internationally recognized guidance) that apply to all computer and network systems and that should be implemented through technical, physical, and administrative measures appropriate to the system(s) in question.

To facilitate access to NIST publications and guidance, as well as a wide variety of other sources of computer security information, we maintain the Computer Security Resource Clearinghouse (CSRC). The CSRC is a World Wide Web (WWW) site containing references to or electronic copies of many NIST computer security documents as well as links to many other valuable resources available on the Web. The address of the CSRC is http://csrc.nist.gov.

NIST cosponsors, with the National Security Agency, the annual National Information Systems Security Conference (formerly the National Computer Security Conference) in Baltimore, Maryland. The conference, one of the largest of its kind, provides a forum for the government, commercial, and academic communities to come together to discuss the latest developments in information security technology. In addition, NIST serves as secretariat for advisory committees and other groups designed to further discussion, cooperation, and coordination among the key communities in the information security field. Two notable groups are the Computer Systems Security and Privacy Advisory Board (CSSPAB), established by the Computer Security Act of 1987, and the Federal Computer Security Program Managers Forum.

INFORMATION ACCESS AND USER INTERFACES DIVISION

The mission of the Information Access and User Interfaces Division is to accelerate the development of technologies that allow intuitive, efficient access, manipulation, and exchange of complex information by facilitating the creation of measurement methods and standards. These technologies include the digitization and representation of multimedia data and the use of spoken and written natural language and visual interactive modalities for search and presentation of that information. Through collaboration with industry, academia, and government, the Division coordinates and provides evaluation methodologies, test suites and corpora, prototypes, workshops, and standards and guidelines to enable faster transition into the commercial marketplace.

Spoken Natural Language Processing

Researchers work closely with industry and other federal agencies to further the development of prototype systems that will permit access to information technology and large knowledge bases using spoken language. These prototype systems contribute to the development of technologies that will permit future access to information services using spoken natural language technologies over the telecommunications network, without requiring reliance on either keyboards or display screens.

ITL has worked with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) spoken language community since 1984, filling a key role in the development and use of speech corpora (databases of speech, transcriptions, and related materials) by this research community. These reference corpora are used for system development and test purposes. Approximately 200 CD-ROMs have been produced by ITL to disseminate these speech corpora throughout the worldwide speech research community, including copies distributed through the National Technical Information Service (NTIS) and the University of Pennsylvania's Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC).

Benchmark tests, which we have implemented within this community since 1987, are used to track technology development for several speech technologies, including speech recognition and understanding, several spotting technologies, and most recently, language identification. The scope of speech recognition technologies under development and test within our community now includes recognition of conversational telephone-channel speech in several foreign languages, including Spanish, Mandarin, and Japanese.

In FY 1996, as in prior years, we implemented benchmark tests for the DARPA Human Language Systems Program and for the Department of Defense. These tests involved a number of "volunteers," research organizations not under contract to the sponsors. Participants included AT&T Bell Laboratories, BBN Systems and Technologies (BBN), Boston University, Cambridge University Engineering Department (England), Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Centre de Recherche Informatique de Montreal (Canada), Dragon Systems, IBM T.J. Watson Research Labs (IBM), International Computer Science Institute, ITT, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique-Laboratoire d'Informatique pour la Mecanique et les Sciences de l'Inginieur (LIMSI) (France), MIT Lincoln Laboratory, MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, MITRE Corporation, New York University, Oregon Graduate Institute, Unisys, University of Karlsruhe, (Germany), Philips GmbH Research Laboratories (Germany), Sanders-Lockheed, and SRI International.

The first "dry run" benchmark tests were successfully conducted at four DARPA contractor's sites (BBN, CMU, Dragon Systems, and IBM), using broadcast data processed by ITL in coordination with the University of Pennsylvania's Linguistic Data Consortium. ITL advocated the use of radio broadcast materials, derived from the Public Radio International "Marketplace" program involving financial news, for these benchmark tests of large vocabulary, speaker-independent, continuous speech recognition technology. The scope of the task was broadened to include "news broadcast" materials derived from both radio and television news broadcasts, and we prepared additional test materials. Preliminary tests on the broadened "broadcast news" task were recently conducted at nine sites. ITL serves as implementor of these benchmark tests, and is responsible for both preparation of the test materials and implementation of all scoring protocols and preparation of summary reports.

We also participated in software sharing efforts involving Cambridge University and Carnegie Mellon University. Our speech recognition test scoring software is widely used internationally. This approach to benchmark testing was adopted for use in the European Union (EU)'s SQALE Program, a multilingual speech recognition project involving the TNO Institute for Perception in the Netherlands, Cambridge University, LIMSI, and Philips GmbH Research Laboratories.

In another ARPA-sponsored project, we worked with Carnegie Mellon University in porting spoken language understanding technology and built a prototype system for this domain. The prototype system provides a spoken natural language interface to electronic libraries, as a specific example of spoken language interfaces to information services. Recent enhancements to the system include automated access to the Montgomery County (Maryland) Public Library collection and to a Web bookseller to look up specific books to determine availability for public library patrons or for purchase.

Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval This Group promotes the use of more effective and efficient techniques for manipulating unstructured textual information, especially the browsing, searching, and presentation of that information. Some of the projects in 1996 are continuations of previous work, but we initiated several new projects.

We continued our very successful Text REtrieval Conferences (TRECs), cosponsored by ITL and DARPA. This conference attracts international participation from information retrieval researchers in industry, academia, and government. The conference has grown from 25 systems in 1992 to 38 systems in 1996, and serves as a major technology-transfer mechanism. The participating groups work with large (ITL-built) test collections, use the same evaluation procedures, and meet for a three-day workshop to compare techniques and results. New for 1996 were investigations into retrieval in Chinese and Spanish, and evaluation of systems using input text produced by degraded optical character recognition (OCR).

Another project is the continued development of the NIST prototype retrieval system, the ZPRISE system. This prototype is based on statistical ranking techniques and was initially developed to prove the effectiveness of these techniques in searching large collections of unstructured text. Earlier work extended this prototype to include a Z39.50-1994 UNIX client and server; this was released as public domain software in July 1995. The goals are to increase our understanding of the Z39.50 standard and our ability to influence and encourage its development and use; to promote the availability of information retrieval services by publishing source code for a working Z39.50 client/server; and to provide an enhanced, user-friendly version of our PRISE application within a Z39.50 interface. Over 80 research and commercial groups worldwide have requested this software. Currently a second release of ZPRISE is under development that will enhance the 1995 version using results from research conducted during 1996. This includes query expansion tools using relevance feedback and a redesigned client based on usability testing done in May 1996.

We are pursuing two projects in conjunction with the Social Security Administration (SSA). The first is consultation and design of usability testing for a pilot search system based on ITL's prototype EAMATE system. This pilot is currently being installed to search 210 gigabytes of earnings records and is scheduled for user testing in the spring of 1997. The second project is a new prototype called HyperIndexer, which is being built to explore the use of automatically built links to access SSA manuals.

We initiated a new feasibility project to investigate methods of building "intelligent" database access systems that can access both textual and non-textual data. This project will be demonstrated for several domains during 1997. Additionally, the Group jointly ran ITL's first usability engineering (UE) symposium (116 attendees) which brought industry and government together to promote the use of UE techniques and to exchange strategies for achieving effectiveness and efficiency in computer systems. Follow-on meetings will focus on usability measurement and methods.

Visual Image Processing

In cooperation with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), we are developing methods for evaluation of optical information processing for face and fingerprint applications and mugshot standards. The goal of the optical information processing project is to develop the metrology needed to industrialize optical information processing using a real commercial application as a testbed. In the mugshot standards project, we seek to develop a standard method for acquiring electronic mugshots which is usable at all levels of law enforcement.

The FBI funded the initial phase of the optical information processing project, which has allowed us to explore the feasibility of optical methods of image storage, 3-D holography, and combining optical correlation and neural networks for fingerprint matching. These efforts showed that properly characterized 3-D analog holographic memory has capabilities for image storage which is sufficient to support various correlation methods of pattern recognition. We also demonstrated that a combination of local optical correlation and neural network matching can be used to provide the first advance on minutia matching in 20 years. If properly combined, these methods should allow a new class of optical pattern matching system to be developed.

The expertise developed in the initial phase of this project allowed us to specify high-impact commercial applications which could use this technology. This is real-time fingerprint matching for user verification for financial use, credit, and Internet security. The Financial Services Technology Consortium is interested in the first application and several small companies are actively pursuing the network access market. In both of these applications, fingerprint matching, retinal scan matching, and face recognition have all been suggested. The projected costs, the input device, and user inconvenience make fingerprint and face more attractive candidates than retinal scanning. At the present state of the technology, fingerprint matching can provide much higher levels of security. In samples of a few thousand, look-a-like faces can usually be found. In 30 million fingerprint samples, no matches have been found between different individuals.

In November 1996, the Visual Image Processing Group released a second version of our public domain OCR system. The new version is approximately twice as fast, has half the errors, and uses half the memory of the previous version of the system. The recognition system processes the Handwriting Sample Forms distributed with NIST Special Database 19. The system reads handprinted fields containing digits, lowercase letters, uppercase letters, and reads a text paragraph containing the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution. Seven hundred copies of the first version were distributed prior to the second release. The release of this system completed our work on form-based OCR systems.

Our Group will begin work in FY 1997 on cost-effective document conversion technology in cooperation with the National Security Agency (NSA). Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technology for many areas of document conversion is being widely used for tasks such as universal library conversion but this technology does not address the need for large-scale, timely conversion of low- quality documents and the impact of this type of conversion on information retrieval. ITL plans to develop the technology needed to apply the evaluation conference concept to the document conversion problem. Conferences will be held to define and focus both commercial and academic research efforts on specific problem areas, to exchange research ideas, and to identify areas requiring future work.

Initially, ITL will use 67,000 pages of the Federal Register (the entire year 1994) which have full typesetting instructions and paper documents. This allows the effect of OCR on ideal images generated by typesetting the text to be compared to real images of scanned paper and allows the effect of various image degradation models to be compared with the OCR of real images. Initially, this comparison will take place in a subset of the data in the 1996 TREC Conference.

Visualization and Virtual Reality

In FY 1996, we developed several three-dimensional interfaces to the NIST PRISE information retrieval system to support easier access to document collections. These systems will form the basis of experiments to support the evaluation of the effectiveness of such interfaces. ITL continues to pursue opportunities within the information retrieval and digital library communities to supply appropriate evaluation methodologies and guidelines that will leverage the technology to support innovative uses of visual displays of information for information retrieval.

A second project, begun two years ago, centers around investigating the appropriateness of virtual environments and the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) for manufacturing applications. The project is affiliated with users and developers through a collaboration with NIST's Manufacturing Engineering Laboratory and the Systems Integration for Manufacturing Applications program. The goal is to assist the manufacturing community in exploring how visualization can improve the manufacturing process. This led to the software modeling of factory floor assembly lines, machine tools, and parts with all associated multimedia information as a virtual environment in VRML. The VIM (Visual Interface for Manufacturing) prototype was constructed in FY 1996 and will support an investigation of the feasibility and usability of Web-based virtual environments for modeling manufacturing processes.

We also acquired data from the Consumer Product Safety Commission consisting of detailed infant and child measurements. This database will be placed into electronic form and converted to VRML models of children via a human body motion simulation package. If successful, this research will be used to construct a standard reference database giving manufacturers easy, platform-independent access to data critical to the testing of the safety of their products.

In late FY 1996, ITL began a collaboration with researchers who have formed a group to develop large datasets to support the visualization and data mining community. The goal is to create large, public datasets in which researchers can experiment with and evaluate the effectiveness of visualization techniques to support information exploration. This is similar to efforts in the machine learning community, but with an emphasis on very large, timely datasets. Also in late FY 1996, we initiated work under the DARPA Intelligent Collaboration and Visualization Program. As part of an evaluation effort designed to provide evaluation tools for DARPA-funded researchers, ITL is addressing the difficult question of how to measure and evaluate collaborative systems by providing metrics and dynamic evaluation and instrumentation tools. We also began internal experimentation with a collaborative tool that is designed to support the standards authoring and commenting process.

HIGH PERFORMANCE SYSTEMS AND SERVICES DIVISION

Research and development of innovative measurement standards, test methods, and testbed design are crucial to the deployment of technologies. The Division assesses the functional capabilities, interoperability, and operational characteristics of high performance systems and provides high performance computing services to NIST scientists.

MultiKron, a VLSI Tool for Performance Measurement

The current instrumentation consists of the MultiKron_II and the MultiKron_vc chips, and their associated tool kits. The chips are designed to be memory mapped to the local processor(s), via the memory or I/O bus. The MultiKron_II provides both event tracing and 16 performance counters, while the MultiKron_vc provides only performance counters, but thousands of them. The MultiKron tool kits are printed circuit boards (PCBs) that contain a MultiKron chip, interface logic to a standard I/O bus (currently VME, Sbus, and PCI), logic for support and management of the MultiKron, and two data storage schemes; a local, dedicated memory on the PCB or a cable to another machine. These tool kits, distributed free of charge, are designed so that experimenters can plug in the PCB, install its support software, and begin to integrate performance measurement into their experiments.

MultiKron technology is being used by U.S.-based computer companies including Intel, Alliant TechSystems (Mukiteo, Washington), and Tera Computer Co. (Seattle, Washington). Intel extracted and implemented a functional subset of MultiKron into their Paragon supercomputer. Alliant TechSystems has used MultiKron concepts in a commercial "UniKron" gate programmable instrumentation for industrial process lines. Tera, a new supercomputer company, has incorporated MultiKron concepts in their machine, which is currently in Beta testing.

Advanced User Interfaces for Supercomputing Applications - WebSubmit WebSubmit was developed as an Intranet application tool that provides an advanced Web page interface to supercomputing applications. It differs from other Web applications because it allows interaction with a user's data files and directories on the target supercomputer. These interactions include reading and writing of the user's data files, functions not normally allowed via a Web page. The advantage of a Web-based interface is that it is hardware and software independent; it is only dependent on whatever Web browser the user has available.

The current WebSubmit implementation is for an IBM SP2 supercomputer and has interfaces to the LoadLeveler job scheduling software; Gaussian 94, a molecular dynamics program; functions to monitor jobs and files on an SP2; and file transfers. All the Web pages are dynamically generated with CGI scripts written in Tcl. The Tcl code is modular, making the addition of new interfaces very easy, and simple to customize for a particular SP2 site.

Future plans for WebSubmit include investigating the use of Java and JavaScript for client-side Web page generation and interaction; using the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) for visualization of Gaussian 94 data; creating a LoadLeveler interface that hides the details of the LoadLeveler and concentrates on the type of problem the user wants to run; and improving the security model of WebSubmit to prevent unauthorized use.

S-CHECK, a Tool for Tuning Complex Programs ITL began distributing a novel tool, S-Check (Sensitivity Checker), for assaying and improving performances of programs. The tool is especially suited for code on parallel systems, where code interactions are common but difficult to evaluate and architectures vary a lot. Code performance interactions are not handled by conventional profiler tools, but S-Check can do this; it detects and quantifies performance interaction strength among suspected code components. S-Check also enjoys the advantage of being portable and scalable.

As a tool, S-Check provides a powerful mix of industrial process control and computer automation. Current versions handle C language programs. S-Check provides capabilities well beyond typical commercial software profilers, because S-Check allows software engineers to determine effects of changes in their codes without them having to make actual changes and rerunning programs. Existing commercial tools only show the time required to execute particular parts of the code, but do not determine whether changes to slow parts of the program will significantly improve performance. With parallel programs, it is quite possible for lightly used sections still to be bottlenecks. Such sections are hard to spot without intimate (and expensive) knowledge of the specimen code and host system. Addressing this problem, S-Check automatically assesses points in the code where changes could be significant. For a detailed view of S-Check, you can access a description of this product at http://www.scheck.nist.gov/scheck.

Advanced Information Processing, Recognition and Storage Systems

The systems were tested for processing mugshot images and fingerprints with an almost 100 percent recognition rate for correct inputs without distortion. Also, a digital method to improve the holographic image quality has been experimentally tested with great success. The systems were demonstrated to the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency, the University of Arizona, and Carnegie Mellon University. These systems are expected to play important roles in handling large amounts of data at a very fast rate.

Volume holographic storage has a great potential storage capacity of the equivalent of a 100-1000 CD's in a one cubic centimeter crystal with an access time of near one million pages per second. As part of our initial research, we built a working holographic memory system fully interfaced with a computer. The system was tested using FBI mugshots and fingerprint images. It provided a reasonable amount of image quality (dynamic range, resolution, etc.) to suit FBI requirements.

An investigation into improving the quality of a holographic image by removing speckle noise was successfully implemented and tested. A series of experiments and analyses to support the idea and to prove its validity have been performed. Various noise sources have been identified and related measurement issues have been raised. Our work complements the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's holographic storage project by emphasizing the metrology of holographic storage. Potential customers for storage devices with large capacity and fast access, such as video-on-demand, include the FBI, NIST, the National Security Agency, and the data storage industry.

Automatic pattern recognition is important in a variety of information applications, such as automatic information handling, processing, and security. We constructed a real-time hybrid optical pattern recognition system that can be used for various pattern recognition, identification, and classification schemes. The system uses both optical pattern recognition and digital neural networks to monitor each stage of information processing such as input images loaded on an SLM (spatial light modulator), two-dimensional Fourier spectra, and correlation outputs. The system was tested for characters, FBI mugshot images, and real- time fingerprints (through a real-time fingerprint scanner) with a high recognition rate (almost 100 percent recognition rate for correct inputs).

Distortion-invariant recognition by optimizing filters using neural network algorithms remains to be improved. A holographic recording process can accommodate distortional variations to allow a reasonable amount of distortion-invariant fingerprint recognition. Our system will use various hybrid approaches and become a testbed for commercial hybrid optical verification systems. The market is increasing for network access security applications, such as the Internet combined with real-time fingerprint matching for user verification. Areas of use include verification of financial instruments (credit and debit cards), access to proprietary databases, or exit/entry verification.

In the area of storage media, we developed techniques for measuring the monitoring and reporting of media errors on optical disks. Optical disk drives are designed with powerful, but not unlimited, error correction capabilities. If the level of media error exceeds the error detection and correction mechanisms implemented in the device controller, the data cannot be corrected by the device and data loss might occur. Our work led to a voluntary industry standard specifying techniques that can be used both initially when the data is transferred to the media and periodically to monitor the status of that data. A drive that implements these techniques can provide users and systems integrators with early warning mechanisms that decrease the possibility of data loss.

Investigations on optical disk data integrity included comprehensive research on the care and handling properties of all types of optical disks including Write-Once Read Many Times (WORM) media, re-writable media, CD-ROMs and CD-R media. An extensive set of experiments on hundreds of optical disks aimed at determining which environments, substances, and fields could be harmful or potentially harmful to the disks. The experiments included smoke from different materials, fire extinguishers, foodsubstances, different temperature and humidity environments, cleaning agents including water, surfactants and alcohol, paints and wax fumes, pressure tests, magnetic fields, electrostatic discharges, X-rays and gamma-rays, read/write/erase cycles, gasoline, diesel and brake fluids. Although some of the disks were affected by some of the experiments, in general optical disks have demonstrated a high resilience to many different environments and care and handling conditions.

Advancing the NIST Scientific Computing Environment

The continued upgrading of the IBM SP2 expanded the capabilities previously provided for scalable parallel processing. The SP2 has grown to 31 nodes; 30 of the nodes have 512MB of memory with 2.4 GB of temporary disk storage, providing a configurable environment for production and research parallel projects.

State-of-the-Art Networking and Telecommunications

DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING AND INFORMATION SERVICES DIVISION

Distributed Processing and Operating Systems Support

A second significant project accomplished by the Group was installing the Synchronize calendaring application for use by all NIST staff. We initially used a small IBM RS6000 as a server for the operational demonstration. The package was then moved to one processor of a large RS6000 dual-processor machine and subsequently to the Sun Microsystems SparcServer 1000E. As this reconfiguration took place, the number of user accounts grew from less that 300 to more that 800. We continued to provide uninterrupted service to all users during the server replacement activity.

Another Group accomplishment was the upgrading of two more file servers from the SunOS operating system to the Solaris operating system. The goal was to have all servers running Solaris, but, as was experienced by migrating the first two servers, many problems must be resolved before the migration will be complete.

The Group also acquired a Digital Equipment Corporation Alpha 1000/266 server running Microsoft Windows NT version 3.51. The operating system was recently upgraded to Windows NT version 4.0. This machine is being used to determine the viability and limitations of Windows NT and whether it is advisable to install such servers at NIST to provide file and printer-sharing services.

Finally, members of the Group designed a new NIST Training Room and installed 21 PCs. The project included having the office space modified, installing a raised floor and special lighting, and equipping the room with the necessary PCs, printers, and projectors.

Information Processing Support

Staff members developed and implemented an enterprise-wide WWW hosting facility for use by the NIST Operating Units (OUs) with an architecture that includes external and internal Web servers. The external servers, http://www.nist.gov in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and http://www.boulder.nist.gov in Boulder, Colorado, are accessible to all Internet users and present NIST public information. The internal server, http://www-i.nist.gov, is used exclusively for the NIST intranet publishing of information for the use of NIST staff only. The internal server serves both Gaithersburg and Boulder.

The Group uses the Network File System (NFS) protocol to create virtual drives on the OU's PCs or workstations. These virtual drives, which are physically located on the Web servers, are used by the OUs to store the information they would like to publish. The Web servers use the most up-to-date software, are secured against tampering, and are centrally monitored and maintained 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Thus, the OUs are not required to use valuable resources to acquire and maintain their own servers and their ability to publish and maintain their own information is not affected.

Additionally, we incorporated other servers for anonymous File Transport Protocol (FTP), for the NIST Locator, and for operation of an automated Travel Manager. Staff members also provided assistance with home page development, WWW CGI programs, online forms, multimedia presentations, and office automated information systems. In FY 1996, we developed new WWW sites for the Office of Quality Programs, http://www.quality.nist.gov; the Information Technology Laboratory, http://www.itl.nist.gov; and a WWW site and information management system for the Advanced Chemical Sciences construction project, http://www.nist.gov/acsl. We also provided WWW programming support to the Manufacturing Extension Partnership in the customizing of WWW search engines and in developing a WWW-based calendaring system.

Administrative Computing Support

The CAMS effort, at times, took a considerable amount of staff resources. We participate in committees on several of the CAMS modules including the Core Financial System (CFS), the Personal Property Module, the Small Purchase System, and the Receiving System. Staff members attend meetings, prepare documentation, convert data, supply test data, work on interface programs, test the system, and assist staff at the CAMS Implementation Center. Additionally, staff attend Oracle Classes to learn and use the tools provided in order to support the CAMS system when implemented. Some of the staff are already involved with the Database Administration activities supporting this system such as establishing databases for user identification, database roles, and tracking users privileges. Other activities include installing SQLNET, TCPIP adaptors, FORMS 4.5 software and runtime modules, printers and printer configurations, and the Oracle Web Service; establishing and maintaining backup and recovery for the UNIX servers, and adding new users, and starting/shutting down databases.

Some of the highlights for the general administrative functional areas included the conversion of most of the financial reports from the COBOL and UNISYS platform to the Financial Databases and the IBM/VM (MICF) platform; the conversion of the FY 1993 financial database from the UNISYS to the MICF platform; and development of the Treasury Payment database for the Office of the Comptroller. We also implemented a new Report Subscription service to facilitate the electronic dissemination of financial reports. Time was spent in the validation and verification of the Time and Attendance data as processed by the National Finance Center (NFC) and catching up with normal business processing that was disrupted in early 1996.

We implemented many new upgrades to administrative support software; these included a new release of the Automated Classification System, the Payout System, the Plant System, the Travel Database system, and the Quick Procurement System. The Procurement Lookup was converted from the UNISYS to the MICF to facilitate obtaining procurement status information. The new applications released into production included the Reorganization System, the Student Employment Program Applicant System, and Procurement Integrity Information System.

SOFTWARE DIAGNOSTICS AND CONFORMANCE TESTING DIVISION

Activities in the Software Diagnostics and Conformance Testing Division focus on the development of software evaluation technology, conformance tests, and standards that can be used to assist U.S. industry in the development of high-quality software. In this role, the Division develops software testing tools and methods, participates with industry in the development of forward-looking information technology standards, and leads efforts for the development of conformance tests even at the early development stage of standards.

Software Analysis Tools

For the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, ITL developed the Unravel Program Slicer which computes "slices" of C programs, where a slice is a subset of the program that contains all lines of code that can directly or indirectly affect the value of a particular variable at a particular point. The tool assists in the effort to debug or test a program since it allows the programmer to focus on those parts of the program that are relevant to the logic in question. Other front ends for the Unravel Program Slicer are being considered for development for other programming languages such as C++ or JAVA.

We are developing a second tool for program maintenance and modification, based on the Unravel tool. This tool, called Surgeon's Assistant, is one that would make it possible to isolate program components for modification and adaptation, make the desired modifications to those isolated program components, and assess the impact of those modifications. The tool may also be an important aid in the development of reuse libraries and in reverse engineering of legacy systems.

In the area of object-oriented programming languages, we initiated a project to extend those languages to include program correctness statements. These statements would be used by programmers to assert conditions which should be met at a given point in the program, thus improving program quality by providing for the immediate notification and location of program behavior. The result of this project is a tool that adds source code instrumentation to detect pre- or post-condition violations, trace values, or diagnose error conditions.

To assist industry in the evaluation of the methods and tools they use to improve software quality, we are developing a library of standard reference materials consisting of software with known errors. This library can be used by software developers to determine the effectiveness of the test tools and techniques they use in developing their systems. As part of this effort, we plan to develop statistical methods of evaluating testing procedures and software development tools and techniques.

Software Conformance Testing

In cooperation with the Air Transport Association (ATA), ITL is building Computer Graphics Metafile (CGM) conformance test suites and is developing a certification test service. Also cooperating in this effort is the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA). Work is under way to develop test suites and automated testing tools for a different CGM profile to be used in expanding the test suite coverage of the ATA profile.

ITL is now completing its work to develop conformance tests for features standardized by the Intermediate SQL level standard for Database Language SQL. With the completion of these final test suites, SQL implementers will have available an authoritative set of tests to be applied during the early stages of product development when it is easiest to correct any errors that are discovered.

In cooperation with the Department of Defense, we are completing the development of the Ada compiler validation capability and the associated conformance testing program procedures. The NIST Ada95 validation program will provide a common economical measure which should substantially increase the reliability of safety critical and non-safety critical Ada tools and products.

A new area of conformance test development is the work now ongoing to develop a test suite in the area of Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML). VRML is quickly being integrated into multiple tools that are being used on the Internet for the viewing of 3-D objects. It is important to establish a VRML test suite that tests for complete conformance to all portions of the VRML specifications. To develop these test suites, ITL researchers are examining the VRML specifications and working with companies and individuals that have created some existing test files, in order to determine how to best achieve full and complete test suite coverage of the VMRL specification.

As a research project, we are investigating new and more efficient approaches to the development of conformance tests. Current conformance tests are developed through the extremely time-consuming process of developing falsification tests. Such testing, while extremely useful, can never cover all requirements and cannot provide total proof of correctness. We are looking at alternatives to falsification testing such as proofs of correctness and statistical measures of correctness. In addition, we are investigating the effectiveness of using automated test generation methods to develop conformance tests for specifications of standards. This research could lead to faster ways of developing conformance tests, resulting in an increased capability for product developers to determine if their products work according to specifications.

Forward-Looking Standards

In the area of Role Based Access Control (RBAC) on the World Wide Web, ITL researchers are developing a technical specification, including a formal description, of RBAC on the Web. We are also developing a proof-of-concept model of such a product, and an abstract and physical test suite to measure conformance to the RBAC model.

Users of standards are often faced with the daunting task of trying to locate and access standards that are appropriate to their work. To simplify this task, we are developing a taxonomy and framework for standards that can be used to both coordinate the development of forward-looking standards and to assist potential users of standards in finding and applying those standards that are applicable to their particular requirements. As part of this effort, an online standards locating and retrieval capability, offering the user multiple interfaces, will be implemented to provide access to standards from both government and commercial sources.

To improve the standards development process, ITL is investigating the development of a method that would enable standards developers to formally define those parts of their specification that are intended to interface with other standards, so that an automated mechanism could be developed that would allow for testing of two or more specifications to ensure that there is no conflict between the specifications. This would make it possible to specify the common parts of interacting standards in a manner that would allow it to be precisely determined if those standards are compatible. This work would make it easier to develop software, based on those standards, that would integrate correctly since it would have already been verified that the interface specifications of those underlying standards were done in a manner that makes them compatible.

In cooperation with the Environmental Protection Agency, NIST initiated a project to focus on development of several specific infrastructure components needed for the intelligent integration of database information with intelligent information services techniques. Particular attention is being paid to the application of classification taxonomies and ontologies, as related to development of an Environmental Data Registry, in order to provide for testable, high-quality access interfaces for multiple types of software that serve as information search engines. As part of this task, we are investigating the application of specified infrastructure components to the research area of network Object Registration.

STATISTICAL ENGINEERING DIVISION

The Statistical Engineering Division seeks to catalyze scientific and industrial research through the application of statistical methods to the experimentation and data analysis underlying the empirical information gathering processes critical to NIST scientists and engineers. To accomplish this mission, the Division develops strong collaborative research relationships with NIST staff in all fields, maintains expertise in the development of statistical methods relevant to measurement science and technology, and ensures that NIST staff have access to information on the latest statistical modeling and analysis techniques necessary for their research.

Statistical Consulting

• Leadership in the establishment of a high standard of statistical practice within NIST via interactions with technical staff, publications, workshops, and seminars;
• Design and analysis of experiments, and evaluation of measurement uncertainties for the NIST Standard Reference Materials (SRM) and Calibration Programs;
• Design and analysis of experiments, and evaluation of protocols and processes associated with NIST scientific endeavors;
• Support of NIST industrial clients engaged in the design and analysis of experiments;
• Development of statistical and probabilistic models for physical science and engineering applications;
• Development of statistical methodology to enhance collaborative research with other NIST laboratories;
• Advancement of statistical methodology via development of algorithms and software; and
• Transfer of statistically based measurement methodology to industry through direct interactions with industrial clients, publications, workshops, and seminars.

Environmental Radioactivity Standard Reference Material (SRM) and Radionuclide Speciation

Division statisticians collaborated with scientists in NIST's Physics Laboratory who constructed an SRM consisting of a 12- component natural matrix ocean specimen. The 1000-bottle SRM 4357 has two sediment sources: the Chesapeake Bay (benign) and the Irish Sea ("hot"). The goal of the project was to determine global (valid across all 1000 bottles) values and uncertainties for each of the 12 elements (radionuclides): potassium, radium, thorium, strontium, uranium, etc. The certification required three steps, all with technical challenges. An interesting distributional conclusion was that the eight "natural" radionuclides tended to have a normal distribution, while the last four "man-made" radionuclides tended to have a Weibull distribution.

Computational Metrology of Manufactured Parts U.S. industry uses more than 20,000 coordinate measurement machines (CMMs). A CMM helps determine if a part conforms to design specifications by measuring the coordinates of a sample of locations on the part surface. Currently, there is no rigorous methodology to determine the accuracy and the precision of the measurements from a CMM. Consequently, CMMs are considered uncalibrated and not traceable to the International Standard (SI) according to International Organization for Standardization (ISO) definitions. Developing calibration methodology for CMMs is necessary for U.S. companies to trade internationally. Additionally, the methodology would promote improvement in quality and efficiency through better determination of part dimensions.

As part of a NIST competency project, Division scientists play an active role in the cross-disciplinary group that is making significant progress towards solving this problem. Initially, the group concentrated on understanding and modeling the CMM probe, which is the largest source of error in the measuring process. The probe is the component of the CMM that senses the contact with the part being measured. The most common class of probes has a construction that leads to pronounced systematic effect in the CMM measurements. Through a large modeling effort, the group produced a reliable model that allows for real-time correction of measurements. The result is an improved measurement system without significant added costs. We also developed an uncertainty procedure for use with the model, a procedure which addresses the overall project goal of traceability.

Statistical Analysis of Retardance Measurements Optical communication, data storage, ellipsometry, sensor and other optoelectronic systems often use linear retarders to control or analyze optical signals. Often these systems require retarders with specific and/or accurately known values of retardance. Division scientists collaborated with NIST's Electronics and Electrical Engineering Laboratory to develop a quarterwave linear retarder designed to have a retardance stable within 0.1þ over a variety of operational and environmental conditions. Three methods are used to measure retardance. One method uses a modified version of standard polarimetric measurements and uses rotating polarizers. Linearly polarized light, with known orientation, is incident on the retarder and the light emerges with an elliptical polarization. The intensities of the perpendicular and parallel states of the emerging light are measured. Many (112) experiments were run to determine the retardance of five rhombs. One finding of the project suggests that the goal of retardance measurement with uncertainty less than 0.1þ is reachable with this system.

Measurement Control for Heart Valve Manufacturer

To address the practical problem, we transformed the raw data matrix, consisting of 24 replications of a 146-dimensional vector, into principal components. Analysis showed the expected result that a very large proportion of the variation is captured in the first one to three principal components. We transmitted this result to the company, along with a copy of Dataplot software and an example program to compute the principal components and construct a control chart for them. MCRI subsequently installed Dataplot and successfully reproduced the calculation of the principal components and the control chart.

NIST Ceramic Machining Consortium

Our expertise focused on the silicon nitride project, where conclusions regarding important grinding parameters could potentially be contaminated by other factors such as laboratory, batch, etc. We contributed a careful design for this large-scale multi-laboratory experiment to assure the validity of the conclusions. Our statisticians further provided the data analysis expertise in ascertaining important grinding factors, uncovering significant non-grinding factors, identifying interactions, and establishing optimal settings.

Statistical Reference Data Sets

INTERACTIONS AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS

SELECTED STAFF ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Department of Commerce Medal Awards and NIST Awards

Patricia D. Barnett received a 1996 Bronze Medal for extraordinary service in supporting the hardware and software for the NIST-wide e-mail and calendaring functions.

Lisa Carnahan received a 1995 Bronze Medal for establishing the FIPS 140-1 validation program whereby accredited laboratories test cryptographic products for conformance to NIST standards.

Christopher Dabrowski received a 1995 Bronze Medal for technical enhancement of domain analysis and its application to the development of an architecture for the National Information Infrastructure.

Judith E. Devaney, Robert R. Lipman, and William F. Mitchell received a 1996 Bronze Medal Group Award for creation of the NIST Parallel Applications Development Environment (PADE).

Cita M. Furlani received a 1995 Silver Medal for the leadership of interagency activities that advance applications of information technology on the National Information Infrastructure.

Barbara Guttman and Edward Roback jointly received a 1995 Bronze Medal for developing An Introduction to Computer Security: The NIST Handbook which promotes comprehensive, cost-effective security programs in the private and public arenas.

Shirley Hurwitz received a 1995 Bronze Medal for leadership of NIST/industry programs in database interoperability and the application of distributed database technologies to electronic commerce.

Stefan D. Leigh received a 1995 Bronze Medal for extraordinary success and dedication in enhancing the effectiveness of statistical collaborations at NIST.

Walter S. Liggett, Jr. shared the 1996 Edward Bennett Rosa Award with four other NIST scientists for the development and international acceptance of a method for the more accurate determination of Rockwell C Hardness, a measured material property of great importance in manufacturing and commerce.

James R. Lyle received a 1996 Bronze Medal for advancing the state of the art and practice in static analysis methods for computer software.

David S. Pallett received a 1996 Bronze Medal for leadership in the development of speech corpora and the use of these corpora by spoken language researchers.

Marianne Swanson and John P. Wack received a 1996 Bronze Medal Group Award for the successful establishment and management of the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST).

External Recognition

Isabel Beichl became a columnist for the IEEE Journal ofComputing Science and Engineering, coauthoring a monthly article on "Computing Prescriptions."

Daniel R. Benigni was elected Vice President for Professional Activities and Chairman of the United States Activities Board (IEEE-USA) for 1997. IEEE-USA promotes the career and public policy interests of the more than 230,000 IEEE members in the United States.

Paul Boggs serves on the Editorial Board of the SIAM Journal of Optimization, the Applied Mathematics Letters and the SIAM News. He was also appointed to the SIAM Science Policy Committee and serves on the review panel for the Army Research Office and the Center for Computing Science.

Ronald Boisvert was appointed to the ACM Publications Board and reappointed as Editor-in-Chief for the ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software for a second three-year term. He was also elected a full member of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Working Group 2.5 (Numerical Software).

Leslie Collica received the ATM Forum Spotlight Award for her technical contributions and her work as Editor and Vice-Chair of the Testing Working Group at the December 1996 ATM Forum.

David Cypher received from the ATM Forum the Editorship of the Protocol Implementation Conformance Statement (PICS) of the Private Network to Network Interface (PNNI) standard.

Keith Eberhardt was elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association.

Michael Garris received the Award for Excellence in Technology Transfer 1996 from the Federal Laboratory Consortium. His software distribution technology is a form-based handprint system for evaluating optical character recognition (OCR). Garris and his associates transferred this state-of-the-art technology in the public domain to numerous industry and government users via a CD-ROM using ISO-9660 format.

John Hagedorn received a Finalist award in the Telly Award competition, an international competition honoring non-network television commercials and programs, and non-broadcast video & film productions, for his computer graphics contribution to the video "Building Fire Research Laboratory - Your Partner in Building."

Lynne B. Hare is the Chair, Section on Quality and Productivity, American Statistical Association for 1996 and the Awards Committee Chair, Statistics Division, American Society for Quality Control, 1995-96. He also serves on the Management Committee of Technometrics.

Raghu Kacker was elected Ordinary Member of the International Statistics Institute.

Samuel J. Lomonaco serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Knot Theory and its Ramifications.

Daniel Lozier was appointed as Associate Editor of Mathematics of Computation and serves as Editor of the NIST Journal of Research.

Roger J. Martin received the 1995 Hans Karlsson Award from the IEEE Computer Society for leadership in the timely completion of test methods which assure quality and dependability for the standards customer, completeness for the portable application builder, and consensus of the whole community.

Victor McCrary was invited by the prestigious Sigma Xi Distinguished Lectureships Program to serve on the 60th College of Distinguished Lecturers for a two-year term from July 1997 to June 1999.

Geoffrey B. McFadden is on the Editorial Board of the SIAM Journal of Applied Mathematics and the Journal of Computational Physics.

William F. Mitchell developed the MGGHAT package for adaptive solution of partial differential equations which was selected as a finalist for SIAM's 1995 Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software.

Fernando L. Podio received the 1996 Standards Excellence Award from the Association for Information and Image Management International (AIIM) for outstanding and valuable contributions to industry through his efforts in the AIIM standards program, especially in standards development in the area of mass storage systems, particularly optical disk.

Roldan Pozo received a 1996 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government for outstanding scientists and engineers beginning their independent research careers. The award recognizes exceptional potential for leadership at the frontiers of scientific knowledge during the twenty-first century.

John Roberts was awarded the Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) Crystal Globe Award. The award was given for service to the Flat Panel Display Interface Committee and the Monitor Committee, including service as Secretary, and for helping VESA to establish its technical electronic mailing lists and file-transfer-protocol site.

Marianne Swanson received the 1996 Leadership and Achievement Award from the Industry Advisory Council of the Federation of Government Information Processing Councils for her work with the Government Information Technology Services (GITS) Board in promoting support mechanisms for governmentwide security initiatives.

C.M. Wang served as President of the American Statistical Association, Colorado-Wyoming Chapter, 1995-96.

PARTICIPATION IN VOLUNTARY STANDARDS ACTIVITIES

TECHNICAL ACTIVITIES

Accredited Standards Committee (ASC)

Technical Committee X3, Information Technology

X3H3 (JTC1/SC24) Computer Graphics & Image Processing - Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) Reference Implementation and Conformance Tests - Mark Skall, Mary Brady, and Lynne Rosenthal

X3H3.3 (IEC/JTC1/SC24/WG6) Multimedia Presentation and Interchange - Lynne Rosenthal and Mary Brady

X3H3.8 (JTC1/SC24/WG7) Image Processing & Interchange - Mark Skall and Susan Sherrick

X3H7 Object Information Management - Elizabeth Fong

X3L1 (ISO TC 211) Geographic Information Systems - Christopher Dabrowski

X3L3.2 (JTC1/SC29/WG10) Still Image Coding - Robert McCabe

X3L8 (JTC1/SC14) Data Representation - Judith Newton and Bruce Rosen

X3L8.6 (JTC1/SC14/WG4) Classification of Data Elements - Judith Newton

X3T4 (JTC1/SC27) IT Security Techniques - Eugene Troy and Ellen Flahavin

Technical Committee X9, Financial Services

X9F.1 Public Key Cryptography for Financial Systems - Miles Smid

X9F.3 Wholesale Bank Security - Elaine Barker

X9F.4 Authentication and Access Control - James Dray

U.S. Technical Advisory Group (TAG) to JTC1/SC22 Programming Languages, Their Environments and Systems Software Interfaces - Java Study Group - Gary Fisher

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM)

American National Standards Institute (ANSI)/National Information Standards Organization (NISO)

American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM)

Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) Forum

Testing Working Group - Leslie Collica

Traffic Management, Residential Broadband, Service Applications - David Su

Digital Audio Visual Council (DAVIC) - Karen Hsing

European Workshop Manufacturers Association (ECMA)

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers(IEEE)

Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)

MGMT Management Area (SNMP, MIBs) - Wo Chang

RTG Routing Area - Douglas Montgomery

SEC Security Protocols Area - Robert Glenn and Shu-Jen Chang

TSV Transport Area (RSVP, RTP) - Douglas Montgomery and Shu- Jen Chang

Privacy & Security Research Group - James Dray and Donna Dodson

Interactive Multimedia Association (IMA)

International Multimedia Teleconferencing Consortium (IMTC)

IGES/PDES Organization (IPO) of the U.S. Product Data Association

(ISO TC 184/SC4) - Lynne Rosenthal

Object Management Group (OMG)

Business Object Management - Elizabeth Fong

Common Facilities Task Force - Barbara Cuthill

Object Request Broker Task Force - John Barkley

Object Services Task Force - John Barkley and Tom Rhodes

Portable Common Tool Environment (PCTE) Special Interest Group - Barbara Cuthill and Tom Rhodes

User SIG - Metrics WG - John Barkley

Open Group (formerly X/Open)

T1S1

Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA)

Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) Consortium

MANAGEMENT ACTIVITIES

ASC X3/OMC Operational Management Committee - Michael Hogan and Robert Rountree

ASC X3/PPC Policy and Procedures Committee - Michael Hogan

ASC X9 Financial Services - Miles Smid and Donna Dodson

ASC X12 Electronic Data Interchange - Jean-Philippe Favreau

AIIM Standards Board - Fernando Podio

ANSI Executive Standards Council - Michael Hogan

ANSI Healthcare Informatics Standards Board (HISB) - Susan Katz

ANSI Information Infrastructure Standards Panel (IISP) - Framework for Standards - Michael Hogan, Christopher Dabrowski, etc.

ANSI Information Infrastructure Standards Panel (IISP) Steering Committee - Shukri Wakid

ANSI Information Systems Standards Board (ISSB)- Michael Hogan

ATM Forum - David Su

Cross Industry Working Team (XIWT) - Shukri Wakid and Jerry Linn

IEEE Standards Board - Robert Rountree

JTC1 TAG (U.S. TAG to ISO/IEC JTC1 on Information Technology) and JTC1 - Michael Hogan

Network Management Forum - Frances Nielsen

North American Interoperability Policy Council (IPC) - Michael Hogan

North American ISDN Users' Forum (NIUF) - Leslie Collica

Object Management Group (OMG) - John Barkley

U.S. TAG for ISO TC 69 Applications of Statistical Methods - Carroll Croarkin and Raghu Kacker

Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) - John Roberts

INDUSTRY INTERACTIONS

Air Transport Association (ATA) and Aerospace Industries Association (AIA)

The ATA and AIA are international nonprofit organizations for the airline industry and aerospace suppliers. The ATA and AIA consist of the major airline companies, aerospace industries, and software and systems suppliers of the commercial aerospace industry. The ATA, AIA, and ITL are working together to develop a graphics profile and conformance tests methods for the interchange of graphics data within the commercial aerospace industry. The commercial aircraft industry is moving away from paper-based delivery of maintenance data to digital delivery. Conformance testing is critical in ensuring that graphics tools and implementations conform to the ATA profile and ease the transition to digital delivery of data. Lynne Rosenthal is the ITL contact.

Association for Information and Image Management International (AIIM)

ITL participates in AIIM International, the world's leading association for information industry users and providers. Members include key U.S. players of the information, document, and image management industry. AIIM is an accredited American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standards development organization involved in creating, disseminating, and promoting industry standards worldwide. Fernando Podio works with the Optical Tape Study Group and participates in the File-Level Metadata for Portability of Sequential Storage Media Study Group.

Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) Forum

The ATM Forum is an international nonprofit organization which accelerates the use of ATM products and services through a rapid convergence of interoperability specifications. About 170 U.S. telecommunications corporations comprise the ATM Forum membership. Through the forum, ITL works with Bellcore, test equipment vendors such as Tekelec and Hewlett-Packard, and ATM switch vendors to develop interoperability test specifications and conformance test suites. We also participate in the Signalling and Traffic Management Working Group to develop ATM service protocols. David Su is the ITL principal.

Cross Industry Working Team (XIWT)

The Cross Industry Working Team (XIWT) is a multi-industry coalition committed to defining the architecture and key technical requirements for a powerful, sustainable national information infrastructure (NII). Members include firms from the computer, networking, telecommunications, publishing and banking sectors, and others with business interests in the NII. NIST is represented on the executive committee by R.J. (Jerry) Linn; other ITL representatives participate in working groups related to their research and development activities.

Digital Audio Visual Council (DAVIC)

The Digital Audio Visual Council (DAVIC) is an international consortium for the emerging digital audio-visual applications and services. The purpose of DAVIC is to identify, select, augment, and develop internationally agreed specifications of open interfaces and protocols that maximize interoperability across countries and applications/services. ITL works with DAVIC members on the interoperability testing of digital video products conforming to DAVIC specifications. These efforts concentrate on the development of conformance test suites and establishment an interoperability testbed where developers could test their products. The ITL principal is David Su.

Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST)

This international, government/industry/academia coalition was formed to share information on information security vulnerabilities and attacks. ITL participates as a member of the FIRST steering committee. John Wack and Marianne Swanson represent ITL in this interaction.

Information Infrastructure Standards Panel (IISP)

The Information Infrastructure Standards Panel (IISP) was created by ANSI to identify critical standards requirements for the emerging Global Information Infrastructure (GII). The work of IISP will lead to the creation of standards that will enable the growth of the GII and help bring about interoperability between GII components developed within different industries. As such, the IISP is predominantly made up of representatives from industry. ITL has contributed to the fulfillment of IISP's mission by devising a conceptual Framework to guide the process of identifying standards requirements and assisting IISP members in the use of this Framework. Christopher Dabrowski is the ITL contact.

Information Infrastructure Task Force (IITF) Committee on Applications and Technology (CAT)

The CAT, led by NIST Director Arati Prabhakar, is responsible for coordinating the Administration's efforts to develop, demonstrate, and promote applications of information technology in specific application areas. ITL works with the CAT working groups and CAT participants in various government agencies and with industry and academia to develop publications, conduct meetings and conferences, distribute both print and electronic information, and respond to queries about the NII and the GII. One resource provided is the NII Virtual Library Home Page found at http://nii.nist.gov, cosponsored with the private sector Council on Competitiveness. Judi Moline is the ITL contact.

Information Technology Industry Council (ITI)

ITL has an informal relationship with the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI). One of ITI's activities is to develop positions on issues in standards, testing, certification and quality assurance. Areas include ergonomics, health, safety and hardware, software and systems functional and performance characteristics. ITI also serves as the secretariat for the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) Accredited Standards Committee X3 (Information Technology) and as U.S. Technical Advisory Group (TAG) administrator for ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 on Information Technology. The ITL liaison to ITI is Michael D. Hogan.

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. is the world's largest technical professional society, promoting the development and application of electrotechnology and allied sciences for the benefit of humanity and the advancement of the profession. ITL maintains close ties with the IEEE to help IEEE identify forward-looking standards efforts and to provide industry input to ITL's program planning for standards and test activities. IEEE's close ties to industry and to academia help ITL to understand industry needs and requirements; to know about academic research in areas of interest to NIST; and to communicate about ITL projects. Daniel R. Benigni is Vice President for Professional Activities and Chairman of the United States Activities Board (IEEE-USA) for 1997.

Interactive Multimedia Association (IMA)

As multimedia applications and objects proliferate on the Internet, standard methods for describing and registering objects will be needed for users and suppliers to easily locate, use, distribute, buy, and lease these objects for their applications. ITL is collaborating with the IMA and other industry and government groups to develop a metadata standard for multimedia objects (i.e., object containing text, graphics, audio, video), initially in the educational learning domain to demonstrate the metadata concept with educational objects in an Internet, Web-based environment. The project is expected to lead to standards for describing multimedia objects using standard metadata descriptions, and identifying other relevant object information through an object registry. ITL will host a pilot system implementation and demonstration at NIST later in 1997. Tom Rhodes coordinates the project for ITL.

International Information Integrity Institute (I4)

This internationally based membership organization of information technology security managers consists of the senior security managers from large, international organizations. NIST is a U.S. Government representative in I4. I4 is managed by SRI International (previously, Stanford Research Institute), which conducts meetings (four per year), produces regular technical reports, and undertakes special research projects. In October 1996, NIST hosted Forum 29, one of four yearly conferences sponsored by I4. The conference focused on electronic commerce security and brought together over 200 specialists from the U.S. and overseas. Stuart Katzke is the ITL contact.

International Multimedia Teleconferencing Consortium (IMTC)

The IMTC is a non-profit corporation founded to promote the creation and adoption of international standards for multipoint document and video teleconferencing. The IMTC and its members promote a "Standards First" initiative to guarantee interworking for all aspects of multimedia teleconferencing. The concentration of this group is on promoting and facilitating the broad use of multimedia teleconferencing based on open standards, including the standards adopted by the ITU. Jean-Philippe Favreau is the principal ITL contact for these activities.

Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)

ITL contributes to the technical development of the Internet through its participation in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The IETF develops standards for internetwork technology and for evolving the Internet Protocol Next Generation (IPng). ITL contributes in the areas of IPv6, IPv4 security, integrated services, systems management, and routing. Additionally, Doug Montgomery co-chairs the IETF interdomain-system-to-interdomain-system (IS-IS) for IP Internet Working Group. Rob Glenn is the contact for non- security related IPv6 work. John Wack works in the IPv6 security and key management areas and Tim Polk serves on the IETF PKIX Working Group which addresses Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) issues.

National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIIAC)

The NIIAC was formed to provide guidance to the Secretary of Commerce and the interagency Information Infrastructure Task Force (IITF) on the development of the National Information Infrastructure. The NIIAC was a 37-member advisory panel composed of individuals representing private industry, labor, state and local governments, public interest organizations, academia, and leading experts in NII-related fields. The NIIAC was established in January 1994 and completed its work in February 1996.

National Information Infrastructure (NII) Awards

Sponsored by over 60 groups from industry, government, and community leaders, the NII Awards recognize innovation and excellence in the use of networked information technology. As the representative of the interagency Information Infrastructure Task Force, ITL provided guidance to NII Awards organizers during the inaugural campaign in 1994-95 and continued to provide support in 1996. Judi Moline is the ITL contact.

National Software Council (NSC)

Incorporated in April 1995, the NSC is a nonprofit membership organization composed of industry, academia, and government members. Its mission is to ensure that the U.S. software industry continues to make a strong and growing contribution to national economic prosperity. ITL staff participated in NSC planning meetings over the past two years to define the scope and direction of the organization. As a government affiliate member of NSC, ITL obtains current information about industry and government technology requirements. Dolores Wallace and Tom Rhodes are the ITL representatives; Rhodes serves on the Executive Committee of the NSC.

Network Management Forum (NMF)

ITL worked with industry consortia to develop OMNIPoint specifications, as defined by the Open Management Roadmap partnership for addressing the full range of network management requirements. Released in Fall 1992, OMNIPoint 1 was the first in a series of incremental specifications intended to provide a common approach to the integration and management of diverse technologies. Fran Nielsen serves as Secretary of the User Advisory Council of the OMNIPoint and is the ITL participant in the NMF.

NII Testbed Consortium (NIIT)

NIST holds membership in the NIIT consortium, an industry, government, and academia collaboration to develop an advanced, nationwide information testbed that will deliver applications to solve real-world problems. Application working groups include Healthcare, Earth and Environmental Sciences, Electronic Commerce, Astrophysics, and Manufacturing. The NIST Concurrent Engineering project is a five-year project that will use currently available high performance computing and communication (HPCC) technologies to develop a platform capable of demonstrating the practical uses of HPCC technologies in concurrent engineering. ITL's participation in the consortium ensures that the NIST Concurrent Engineering project will be closely linked with industry efforts to focus on actual industry needs and to ensure maximum benefit from the NIST efforts. Shukri Wakid is the principal NIST participant.

Object Management Group (OMG)

The OMG is a nonprofit international consortium, based in Framingham, Massachusetts, of over 500 organizations whose mission is to research, develop, and promote the use of object oriented technology for distributed systems development. The membership consists of all the major producers of information technology hardware and software (e.g., IBM, DEC, Sun, Microsoft), large user organizations e.g., Boeing, Bellcore, Merrill Lynch, Citibank, GTE, MCI, British Telecom), government agencies (e.g., NASA, NSA, DISA, NIH), and universities (e.g., MIT, Stanford, University of Illinois, University of Michigan). Over the past year, NIST representatives from ITL and the Manufacturing Engineering Laboratory attended OMG meetings as part of joint project with DISA and Sematech to develop an open, distributed framework for semiconductor manufacturing. John Barkley is ITL's technical point of contact in the OMG.

Open Group

Created by the recent merge of X/Open and the Open Software Foundation (OSF), the Open Group provides a forum for vendors to discuss and establish consensus on open system specifications. A member of the former X/OPEN User Council for several years, ITL works closely with this group in the development of conformance testing technology for information systems. We maintain an informal relationship with the former OSF, an international organization dedicated to the development and delivery of an open, portable software environment to which vendors and users have equal input and access. OSF efforts address the need for portability, interoperability, and scalability. The organization made their Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) technology available for use in our distributed systems engineering work.

Society for Information Display (SID)

This worldwide professional society and forum is committed exclusively to the advancement of information display technologies. Membership in SID entitles ITL to participate in SID-sponsored symposia, seminars, and access to SID publications. John Roberts is the principal contact.

Software Engineering Institute (SEI)

Established by Congress in 1984, the SEI is a research and development center with a broad charter to address the transition of software engineering technology. ITL established a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with SEI to work collaboratively on software engineering issues of mutual interest. Under this agreement, ITL and SEI worked together to address issues and develop standards for integrated software engineering environments. SEI also participated with ITL in the formation of the Center for High Integrity Software Systems Assurance. An ITL staff member served on SEI's Educational Products Advisory Board with representatives from Texas Instruments, AT&T, Carnegie Mellon University, Rochester Institute of Technology, and the Department of the Army.

Software Productivity Consortium (SPC)

An industry-based consortium founded in 1985, the SPC focuses on advancing the fundamental processes and methods of software and systems engineering technologies for developing high-quality software intensive systems. The SPC provides a forum for ITL to collaborate with industry, government, and academia on development, application, and exchange of advanced software processes and methods for developing high-quality software systems. The forum allows ITL to contribute its technical views, program results, and capabilities to various industry sectors and provides a mechanism for technology exchange and further collaboration with industry. Tom Rhodes represents ITL in this consortium.

Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA)

The TIA is a major developer of voluntary standards for telecommunications products and the principal U.S. developer for fiber optic standards, building wiring standards, and cellular telephony standards. Bill Burr, who serves as Chairman of the Federal Wireless Policy Committee subcommittee on Privacy and Authentication, attends meetings of the TIA TR 46 (committee on Personal Communications Systems) ad hoc on Privacy and Authentication and the TIA TR 45 (committee on cellular telephony) Ad Hoc Authentication Group (AHAG) to reflect federal security concerns about wireless and cellular communications.

Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) Special Interest Group (SIG) on Flat Panel Displays

ITL's Workshop on the Computer Interface to Flat Panel Displays, held in San Jose, California, in January 1994, resulted in a consensus to form a VESA SIG to undertake the development of a standard or series of standards for the interface between a flat panel display and its controller. This interface standard addresses both active and passive flat panel displays in integrated devices, and will cover both the electrical and the mechanical specifications. As a full member of VESA, ITL participates in the technical development of standards and develops laboratory implementations of proposed interface architectures by developing laboratory metrics. The ITL contact is John Roberts.

SELECTED COLLABORATIONS

Calibration Software

ODRPACK, software developed by ITL's Mathematical and Computational Sciences Division, is uniquely well-suited for modeling three-dimensional data such as the data produced by localizers. By applying ODRPACK to their problem, Image Guided Technologies was able to find and correct problems with their process. In addition, ODRPACK enabled them to develop new models for the optical properties of their system. Now, every system they ship is tested and certified for accuracy using software built on ODRPACK.

ODRPACK solves the extended nonlinear least squares problem where both the explanatory as well as the dependent variables have errors, a procedure sometimes known as Orthogonal Distance Regression. ITL developed the algorithm and the software, which is available using the NIST Guide to Available Mathematical Software (GAMS) (http://gams.nist.gov/). Janet Rogers is the ITL contact.

Electronic Signatures

CEFMS is a Corps-wide system that migrates numerous financial applications, such as purchase requests, obligations, disbursement, and travel order certification, to a completely electronic format. Corps employees generate unique electronic signatures on electronic forms, and other CEFMS users electronically verify the correctness of those signatures, eliminating the need to generate paper-based forms with handwritten signatures. The subsystem of CEFMS that provides this signature generation and verification capability is the Electronic Signature System (ESS). In 1992, ITL designed the technical specifications for the Army Corps' Request for Proposal (RFP) for the ESS, implementing the Data Encryption Standard algorithm, key notarization techniques, cryptographic service calls (CSCs), and a software reference implementation of many ESS functions.

Approximately 5,000 CEFMS users currently use the EES, and it is anticipated that over 40,000 Corps personnel will eventually use the system. The ESS was designed to be a modular system that can be implemented by other government agencies. For example, the Department of State recently adopted the ESS to enhance security in an inter-embassy financial application. Participants in the project included the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, two of the Corps' contractors (Gradkell Systems Inc. and Litronic), the General Accounting Office, and ITL staff members Jim Foti, Sharon Keller, and Donna Dodson.

Usability Engineering

In designing new government computer systems and in redesigning legacy systems, industry and government must be aware of the best practices now available to ensure the usability of such systems. Topics covered at the symposium included an introduction to usability engineering, usability trends in government, success stories, costs and benefits, standards and guidelines, industry strategies and practices, special issues for complex systems, and making usability work in the organizations. Laura Downey coordinated the conference for ITL.

Support for Automotive Industry

Statistics in Quality, Industry, and Technology

Video-on-Demand Interoperability Testing

On the first day, more than 200 people viewed the demonstration of the Video-on-Demand (VoD) Interoperability Test Laboratory facility constructed by ITL. The purpose of the test event was to show that DAVIC-compliant equipment could interoperate. A total of eight companies from the U.S., Europe, and Japan participated in the event, interconnecting their VoD components, video server and Set-Top-Unit (STU), via an ATM network. Equipment used in the demonstration consisted of prototype implementations using either workstations or high-end personal computers (PCs). The STUs from other participants successfully accessed ITL's video server, and ITL's STU interoperated with Columbia's server. ITL announced at the closing plenary of the DAVIC meeting that we are ready to conduct interoperability tests with other parties at its laboratory. David Su is the ITL contact.

Electronic Statistical Handbook

Sparse Matrix Software

Many physical modeling and simulation problems give rise to large sparse linear systems, and these are frequently the computational bottleneck of an application code. The availability of efficient low-level BLAS routines is therefore of keen interest to computational scientists and scientific computing vendors.

The BLAS Technical Forum is a multidisciplinary group with commercial participants (IBM, Digital Equipment Corporation, Cray Research) as well as participants from universities and research centers. The Forum is working on the establishment of interface standards to enable libraries for sparse and parallel linear algebra computation to interoperate easily and efficiently. More information about the NIST Sparse BLAS effort can be found at "http://math.nist.gov/spblas". Roldan Pozo and Karin Remington are the ITL contacts.

Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)

By working together to develop a PKI, industry and government users help to ensure that future PKI components from different manufacturers can interoperate. A PKI is essential to facilitate the use of digital signatures and other forms of public key cryptography by industry and government users of information systems. Donna Dodson and Noel Nazario coordinated the ITL effort.

Intelligent Collaboration and Visualization

Prototype Conferencing Products Interoperability

The International Multimedia Teleconferencing Consortium, Inc. (IMTC) organized the event to facilitate the rapid development and delivery of T.120 standards-based conferencing products and services, and to continue promoting the importance of industry-wide interoperability as a base for building consumer confidence. Conferencing technologies are used in applications such as distance learning, telemedicine, corporate training, and working collaboratively with distant colleagues. T.120 applications currently include shared whiteboarding and multipoint file transfer. Consumer-oriented applications that require real-time, multipoint data delivery, such as multiplayer games, online chat programs, and virtual reality simulations, are also expected to incorporate the T.120 standards, a series of standards for real-time, multipoint data exchange. The evolving series, initially adopted by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in March 1995, continues to be extended. Programs such as Event-120 ensure that the standards are interpreted and implemented by different vendors in a way that advances industry-wide interoperability of their products. As has been proven with other successful technologies, such as electronic mail and fax machines, interoperability of products and services is essential to widespread acceptance.

A second test event was held concurrently, IMTC's third H.324 Interoperability Test Event, sponsored by Intel. Testing vendors included 8x8, Inc., Acer Advanced Labs, Inc., Creative Labs, Inc., Intel Corporation, Lucent Microelectronics, Multimedia Access Corporation, RSA Communications Inc. (Cirrus Logic), Smith Micro (Video Products Division), Sony, Teles AG, VDOnet Corporation, Vivo Software, and Winbond Systems Lab. During the session, participants performed structured interoperability tests between products based on the ITU-T H.324 standard for videoconferencing. H.324 protocols tested were G.723, H.263, H.245 and H.223. Jean-Philippe Favreau is the ITL contact.

COOPERATIVE RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT AGREEMENTS

Research PartnerProject

The following CRADA partners collaborated with us on the Development of Interoperable Public Key Infrastructure Specifications:

The North American ISDN Users' Forum (NIUF) is an industry/government forum established in 1988 to create a strong user voice in the implementation of ISDN applications. In 1996, CRADA partners were:

GUEST RESEARCHERS

Organizations represented include:

Al-Akhamayn University
American National Standards Institute
Bhabha Atomic Research Center
Department of Defense
Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, Korea
Environmental Protection Agency
Flinders University
George Mason University
George Washington University
Institut National des Telecommunications, France
Korea Telecom Research Laboratories
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Ministry of Information and Communications, Taiwan
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
National Science Foundation
National Security Agency
Purdue University
Space Science and Technology Center, People's Republic of China
Syracuse University
Trusted Information Systems, Inc.
University of Maryland, Baltimore
University of Maryland, College Park
University of Nancy, France
University of South Florida
University of Texas at Austin
University of Twente, The Netherlands
VDG, Inc.

Faculty Appointments 27

Colleges and universities represented include:

Arizona State University
Colorado State University
Columbia University
George Mason University
Howard University
Loyola College
Old Dominion University
Temple University
University of Maryland, Baltimore Campus
University of Maryland, College Park
University of North Carolina
University of Tennessee
West Virginia University

INTERNATIONAL ACTIVITIES

ITL assisted the Singapore National Computer Board in reviewing and updating their information technology security standards. Stuart Katzke and Dennis Steinaur, Computer Security Division, provided the technical assistance.

ATM Network Technology

Through a Memorandum of Understanding, ITL, the Korean Telcom Research Group (KTRG), and the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) are jointly developing abstract conformance test and interoperability test suites for the ATM network protocols and Video-on-Demand (VoD) service. KTRG and ETRI assigned guest scientists to work at NIST in developing test suites and VoD reference implementations.

Collaboration with Electrotechnical Laboratory (ETL), Japan

As part of an ongoing ITL-ETL study on computer performance, Roldan Pozo spent two weeks as Visiting Scientist at the Electrotechnical Laboratory (ETL) in Tsukuba, Japan in February at the invitation of the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry. Pozo presented four lectures on iterative methods for solving large sparse linear algebraic systems, object-oriented software design for scientific computing, and performance modeling of multifrontal methods for distributed memory architectures. The lectures took place at ETL, Fujitsu Laboratories, the KEK High-Energy Physics Colloquium, and the Performance Measurement Consortium in Tokyo. At Fujitzu, Pozo viewed a demonstration of the company's next-generation parallel computers.

Collaboration with Russian Academy of Sciences

As part of an international agreement between ITL and the Russian Academy which fosters scientific exchanges, Daniel Lozier hosted a six-week visit to NIST in October-November 1995 by Dr. J.M. Rappoport of the Russian Academy. Rappoport has published algorithms and software for special function evaluation, mostly in the Russian literature. During his visit, Dr. Rappoport began a collaboration with ITL scientists on algorithms for the MacDonald (modified Bessel) functions. These arise as the Kernel of the Kontorovich-Lebedev integral transform, for which little software exists in Western computer libraries.

Common Criteria (CC)

To improve the metrics and methods required to specify, build, and evaluate advanced information technology (IT) security products and systems, ITL is collaborating with Canada, France, United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands to develop a common criteria that is flexible, extensible, responsive to market forces, and accepted by the major western economic powers. The CC is a comprehensive framework and technical criteria for defining and evaluating the security of IT products and systems. Specific activities include a North America-Europe effort to develop a harmonized CC and the conduct of trial evaluations to validate the CC. Another project, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, compares evaluations of the Trusted Mach Operating System against the European Information Technology Security Evaluation Criteria. The evaluations are being conducted by United Kingdom and German commercially licensed evaluation laboratories.

Cryptographic Applications Program Interfaces In December 1994, ITL sponsored a workshop to address the growing interest in developing a generic Cryptographic Applications Program Interface (CAPI) and the need for convergence in the development of standards. This work is a collaborative effort with the United Kingdom (UK) Ministry of Defence, the National Security Agency, several standards organizations, and some commercial vendors. Officials from the UK and Canada shared their experiences with CAPI initiatives in their countries, and all participants agreed to coordinate future activities in this effort. A second meeting was held in March 1996, and periodic information exchanges continue.

Cryptographic Module Validation

ITL and the Communications Security Establishment of the Government of Canada collaborated on the development of the Cryptographic Module Validation Program, announced jointly on July 17, 1995. Products validated by this program as conforming to FIPS 140-1, Security Requirements for Cryptographic Modules, are accepted for use in both the U.S. and Canada for the protection of sensitive, unclassified information.

G-7 Global Information Society Inventory Pilot Project

Under the coordination of the European Community and Japan, the Global Inventory Project (GIP), one of eleven pilot projects designed to stimulate global applications of information technologies, aims to produce a multimedia inventory of national and international projects, studies, and calls relevant to the promotion and further development of knowledge and understanding of the information society. As the U.S.A.'s point of reference, ITL established an entry point for a sampling of current and proposed U.S. information infrastructure projects under ten application areas defined by the G-7 nations. Electronic project submission and access to the resources are available via the U.S. National Information Infrastructure Virtual Library Home Page at URL http://nii.nist.gov/.

G-7 Pilot Project on Global Electronic Commerce

Along with Japan and the European Community (EC), the Department of Commerce was designated the lead agency in a G-7 Information Society Pilot Project "Global Marketplace for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs)." The SME project seeks to identify the information needs of SMEs, promote SME use of the information infrastructure, and encourage the development and demonstration of electronic marketing, cooperation, and trade. The Department of Commerce and CommerceNet Consortium hosted a G-7 Working Group meeting in San Jose, California, in September 1995, at which ITL participated in the demonstration of the G-7 "Global Marketplace" server.

International Public Sector Information Technology (IPSIT) Group

IPSIT is an informal association of representatives of public sector organizations that identify, discuss, share experiences and raise awareness on issues in information management and technology in an informal and candid way with a view to encouraging action and resolution. IPSIT discusses topics of mutual interest from the perspective of national solutions. Areas of interest include common information and communications architectures, interconnectivity, information exchange, use of standards, and publicly available specifications. Participation includes representatives from Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Portugal, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, and the U.S. ITL participates as a representative of the U.S. Government.

International Statistics Institute (ISI)

Raghu N. Kacker, Statistical Engineering Division, was elected an Ordinary Member of the ISI in 1995. With fewer than 2000 members representing 96 countries, the ISI elects fewer than 100 new members annually.

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)

Based in Brussels, Belgium, the OECD is associated with the European Community (EC). ITL participated in the OECD Cryptography Experts Group in discussions on the development of cryptography principles. Edward Roback represented ITL in this effort.

Technical Support to Jordan

At the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Summit held in Amman, Jordan, in November 1995, three ITL staff members participated in the demonstration of the use of the Internet (recently named MENA-PeaceNet) to foster commerce and other peaceful activities in the Middle East. A satellite link was installed in Amman to connect to the U.S. and a microwave link was added to provide connectivity to one of the hotels where the ministers were to meet. A special demonstration to show some of the features of the Internet was arranged for the ministers of the countries signatory to Middle East Peace agreements (Taba Ministers) including Egypt, Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority. The system was operated for the duration of the Summit.

Follow-on meetings were held at the International Trade Administration (ITA) of the Department of Commerce. Our staff also participated in meetings with representatives of Egypt, Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinian Authority, in Amman, Jordan; with representatives of the Middle East and North African (MENA) Secretariat, in Rabat, Morocco; and with representatives of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Geneva, Switzerland. The meetings resulted in plans to set up skeleton Web pages to permit each participating country to enter information about its geography, its trade requirements, and its programs, its industrial activities, its products, and other commercial activity. Web pages were prepared and installed on a NIST server (URL=mena- peacenet.nist.gov). In addition, ITL also provided six e- mail reflectors. The new Web site and e-mail reflectors were presented to the TABA Ministers at the MENA Summit in Cairo, Egypt, held November 12-14, 1996.

World Summit on Trade Efficiency

In November 1994, four computer scientists participated in the World Summit on Trade Efficiency as part of the Official U.S. Delegation. ITL demonstrated a pilot electronic commerce SmartProcurement system jointly developed with the Enterprise Integration Technologies Corporation. The SmartProcurement system is an innovative application of two evolving computer technologies, the WWW and Intelligent Agents, and reduces bid time from vendors to hours instead of days or weeks.

Worldwide Electronic Commerce: Law, Policy, Security and Controls Conference

In October 1995, ITL participated as an affiliated cosponsor of an international conference on issues of electronic commerce and the law. About 300 industry, government, and foreign participants attended. Other cosponsors included the American Bar Association; the Centre for Commercial Law Studies, Queen Mary & Westfield College, UK; EDI Association of the UK; Harvard Law School, International Union of Latin Notaries; International Chamber of Commerce, Paris; Software Publishers Association; United Nations Commission on International Trade Law; and the U.S. Council of International Business.

PATENTS

Cryptographic Key Notarization Methods and Apparatus
Miles Smid and Dennis Branstad
Issued May 31, 1983

Satellite Controlled Digital Clock System
Joseph Cateora, Dick Davis, and D. Hanson
Issued March 29, 1977

Object/Anti-Object Neural Network Segmentation
Charles Wilson, Michael Garris, and R. Wilkinson
Issued September 14, 1993

Method and Apparatus for Analyzing Character Strings
Jon Geist
Issued July 12, 1994

Automated Recognition of Characters Using Optical Filtering With Positive and Negative Functions Encoding Pattern and Relevance Information
Charles Wilson
Issued November 1, 1994

Automated Recognition of Characters Using Optical Filtering With Maximum Uncertainty Minimum Variance (MUMV) Functions
Charles Wilson and James Blue
Issued December 6, 1994

Apparatus For Identifying Unknown Words By Comparison to Known Words
Jon Geist
Issued February 21, 1995

Procedure for Digital Image Restoration
Alfred S. Carasso
Issued May 9, 1995

Aerosol Mass Spectrometer
Kensei Ehara
Issued June 27, 1995

PUBLICATIONS

NIST Publications are available from the Government Printing Office (GPO) at (202) 512-1800 or the National Technical Information Service (NTIS) at (703) 487-4650. SN numbers are stocked by GPO; PB numbers are stocked by NTIS. Our NIST Publications List 88, Information Technology Publications and Products, is available online at http://www.itl.nist.gov. Click on Products, then click on Publications (at bottom of screen).

STANDARD REFERENCE MATERIALS SERIES

NIST INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY SERIES

500-220Guide on Open System Environment (OSE) Procurements
By Gary Fisher
October 1994PB95-169496$31.00

500-221 A User Study: Informational Needs of Remote National Archives and Records
Administration Customers
By Judi Moline and Steve Otto
November 1994 PB95-154738 $25.00

500-222 Glossary of Software Reuse Terms
By Susan Katz, Christopher Dabrowski, Kathryn Miles, and Margaret Law
December 1994 PB95-178992 $19.50

500-223 A Framework for the Development and Assurance of High Integrity Software
By Dolores R. Wallace and Laura M. Ippolito
December 1994 PB95-173084 $21.50

500-224 Stable Implementation Agreements for Open System Environment, Version 8, Edition 1 December 1994 (supersedes NIST SP 500-214)
Albert Landberg, Workshop Chairman; Joseph Hungate, Workshop Vice Chairman; and
Brenda Gray, Editor
December 1994 Available on CD-ROM at (202) 371-1013.

500-225 Overview of Third Text Retrieval Conference (TREC-3)
D. K. Harman, Editor
April 1995 PB95-216883 $67.00

500-226 Self Monitoring Accounting Systems
By Roger F. Sies
March 1995 PB95-216602 $19.50

500-227 ELECTRONIC ACCESS: BLUEPRINT for the National Archives and Records Administration
By Judi Moline and Steve Otto
April 1995 SN003-003-03330-8 $4.50

500-228 Guidelines for the Evaluation of X.500 Directory Products
By John Tebbutt
May 1995 PB95-231908 $21.50

500-229 Z39.50 Implementation Experiences
Paul Over, William E. Moen, Ray Denenberg, and Lennie Stovel, Editors
September 1995 PB96-114939 $28.00

500-230 Application Portability Profile (APP) The U.S. Government's Open System Environment Profile Version 3.0
By Gary E. Fisher
February 1996 SN003-003-03389-8 $7.00

500-231 Guidelines for the Evaluation of Electronic Data Interchange Products
By John J. Garguilo and Paul Markovitz
February 1996 SN003-003-03382-1 $4.25

500-232 Open System Environment (OSE): Architectural Framework for Information Infrastructure
By Frederick (Fritz) Schulz
December 1995 SN003-003-03380-4 $3.75

500-233 A Manager's Guide for Monitoring Data Integrity in Financial Systems
By Roger Sies
February 1996 SN003-003-03387-1 $5.00

500-234 Reference Information for the Software Verification and Validation Process
By Dolores R. Wallace, Laura Ippolito, and Barbara Cuthill
April 1996 SN003-003-03410-0 $6.50

500-235 Structured Testing: A Testing Methodology Using the Cyclomatic Complexity Metric
Dolores Wallace, Editor; A. H. Watson and T.J. McCabe
August 1996 SN003-003-03426-6 $13.00

500-236 Overview of the Fourth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC-4)
Donna K. Harman, Editor
October 1996 SN003-003-03430-4 $59.00

NIST COMPUTER SECURITY SERIES

800-10 Keeping Your Site Comfortably Secure: An Introduction to Internet Firewalls
By John P. Wack and Lisa Carnahan
December 1994 PB95-182275 $21.50

800-11 The Impact of the FCC's Open Network Architecture on NS/NP Telecommunications Security
By Karen Olsen and John Tebbutt
February 1995 PB95-189445 $19.50

800-12 An Introduction to Computer Security: The NIST Handbook
By Barbara Guttman and Edward Roback
October 1995 SN003-003-03374-0 $18.00

800-13 Telecommunications Security Guidelines for Telecommunications Management Network
By J. Kimmins, C.R. Dinkel, and D.L. Walters
October 1995 SN003-003-03376-6 $3.50

800-14 Generally Accepted Principles and Practices for Securing Information Technology Systems
By Marianne Swanson and Barbara Guttman
September 1996 SN003-003-03423-1 $7.50

NIST FEDERAL IMPLEMENTATION CONVENTIONS FOR ELECTRONIC DATA INTERCHANGE SERIES

881-1Federal Implementation Guideline for Electronic Data Interchange, ASC X12 003040
Transaction Set 838 Trading Partner Profile (Vendor Registration), Implementation
Convention
Jean-Philippe Favreau, Editor
August 1995 SN003-003-0336304 $4.25

881-2Federal Implementation Guideline for Electronic Data Interchange, ASC X12 003040 Transaction
Set 838 Trading Partner Profile (Confirmation of Vendor Registration), Implementation Convention
Jean-Philippe Favreau, Editor
August 1995 SN003-003-03364-2$1.75

881-3 Federal Implementation Guideline for Electronic Data Interchange, ASC X12 003050
Transaction Set 850, Award Instrument, Implementation Convention
Jean-Philippe Favreau, Editor
August 1995 SN003-003-03365-1 $14.00

881-4 Federal Implementation Guideline for Electronic Data Interchange, ASC X12 003050
Transaction Set 860, Modifications to Award Instrument, Implementation Convention
Jean-Philippe Favreau, Editor
August 1995 SN003-003-03366-9 $15.00

881-5 Federal Implementation Guideline for Electronic Data Interchange, ASC X12 003050
Transaction Set 865 Purchase Order Change Acknowledgment/Request - Seller Initiated,
Implementation Convention
Jean-Philippe Favreau, Editor
February 1996 SN003-003-03397-9 $11.00

881-6 Federal Implementation Guideline for Electronic Data Interchange, ASC X12 03050
Transaction Set 855 Purchase Order Acknowledgment, Implementation Convention
Jean-Philippe Favreau, Editor
February 1996 SN003-003-03398-7 $3.00

881-7 Federal Implementation Guideline for Electronic Data Interchange, ASC X12 003050
Transaction Set 843 Response to Request for Quotation, Implementation Convention
Jean-Philippe Favreau, Editor
February 1996 PB96-168984$35.00

881-8 Federal Implementation Guideline for Electronic Data Interchange, ASC X12 003050
Transaction Set 840, Request for Quotation, Implementation Convention
Jean-Philippe Favreau, Editor
February 1996 SN003-003-03402-9 $13.00

881-9 Federal Implementation Guideline for Electronic Data Interchange, ASC X12 003050
Transaction Set 836, Procurement Notices, Implementation Convention
Jean-Philippe Favreau, Editor
February 1996 SN003-003-03400-2 $3.25

881-10 Federal Implementation Guideline for Electronic Data Interchange, ASC X12 003040
Transaction Set 810, Invoice -- [Commercial Invoice], Implementation Convention
Jean-Philippe Favreau, Editor
November 1996

881-11 Federal Implementation Guideline for Electronic Data Interchange, ASC X12 003040
Transaction Set 820, Payment Order/Remittance Advice, Implementation Convention
Jean-Philippe Favreau, Editor
November 1996

881-12 Federal Implementation Guideline for Electronic Data Interchange, ASC X12 003040
Transaction Set 855, Purchase Order Acknowledgement, Implementation Convention
Jean-Philippe Favreau, Editor
November 1996

881-13 Federal Implementation Guideline for Electronic Data Interchange, ASC X12 003040
Transaction Set 997, Functional Acknowledgement, Implementation Convention
Jean-Philippe Favreau, Editor
November 1996

881-14 Federal Implementation Guideline for Electronic Data Interchange, ASC X1203050
Transaction Set 864, Text Message, Implementation Convention
Jean-Philippe Favreau, Editor
November 1996

881-15 Federal Implementation Guideline for Electronic Data Interchange, ASC X1203050
Transaction Set 824, Application Advice, Implementation Convention
Jean-Philippe Favreau, Editor
November 1996

881-16 Federal Implementation Guideline for Electronic Data Interchange, ASC X12 003050
Transaction Set 832, Price/Sales Catalog, Implementation Convention
Jean-Philippe Favreau, Editor
November 1996

881-17 Federal Implementation Guideline for Electronic Data Interchange, ASC X12 003050
Transaction Set 997, Functional Acknowledgement, Implementation Convention
Jean-Philippe Favreau, Editor
November 1996

881-18 Federal Implementation Guideline for Electronic Data Interchange, ASC X12 003040
Transaction Set 840, Request for Quotation, Implementation Convention
Jean-Philippe Favreau, Editor
November 1996

NIST SPECIAL PUBLICATIONS

Putting the Information Infrastructure to Work: Report of the Information
Infrastructure Task Force Committee on Applications and Technology

868 The Information Infrastructure: Reaching Society's Goals
Office of the Director, NIST; Kathleen Roberts, Editor
September 1994 SN003-003-03283-2 $11.00

FEDERAL INFORMATION PROCESSING STANDARDS (FIPS) APPROVED 1995-96

To request our bulletins or to be placed on our bulletin mailing list, call (301) 975-2817.

John Wack and S. Kurzban, Computer Virus Attacks, August 1990.

Edward Roback, Computer Security Roles of NIST and NSA, February 1991.

Roy Saltman, Security Issues in the Use of Electronic Data Interchange, June 1991.

Elizabeth Lennon, The NIST POSIX Testing Program, October 1991.

Jim Dray, Advanced Authentication Technology, November 1991.

John Wack, Establishing a Computer Security Incident Response Capability, February 1992.

Dennis Branstad, An Introduction to Secure Telephone Terminals, March 1992.

Edward Roback, Disposition of Sensitive Automated Information, October 1992.

Edward Roback, Sensitivity of Information, November 1992.

Shirley Radack, Guidance on the Legality of Keystroke Monitoring, March 1993.

Mark Skall and Lynne Rosenthal, The NIST Graphics Testing Program, April 1993.

Edward Roback and Barbara Guttman, Security Issues in Public Access Systems, May 1993.

John Wack, Connecting to the Internet: Security Considerations, July 1993.

Barbara Guttman and Edward Roback, Security Program Management, August 1993.

Edward Roback and Barbara Guttman, People: An Important Asset in Computer Security, October 1993.

Edward Roback and Barbara Guttman, Computer Security Policy: Setting the Stage for Success, January 1994.

Barbara Guttman, Edward Roback, and Elizabeth Lennon, Threats to Computer Systems: An Overview, March 1994.

John F. Barkley, Reducing the Risks of Internet Connection and Use, May 1994.

Donna Dodson, Edward Roback, and Elizabeth Lennon, Digital Signature Standard, November 1994.

Shirley Radack (editor), The Data Encryption Standard: An Update, February 1995.

Frederick Boland, Acquiring and Using Asynchronous Transfer Mode in the Workplace, March 1995.

Shirley Radack, Standards for Open Systems: More Flexibility for Federal Users, May 1995.

Lisa Carnahan, FIPS 140-1: A Framework for Cryptographic Standards, August 1995.

Barbara Guttman and Elizabeth Lennon, Preparing for Contingencies and Disasters, September 1995.

David Ferraiolo, John Barkley, and Shirley Radack, An Introduction to Role-Based Access Control, December 1995.

Robert Bagwill, Human/Computer Interface Security Issues, February 1996.

Gary Fisher and Elizabeth Lennon (editor), Millennium Rollover: The Year 2000 Problem, March 1996.

Eugene Troy, Guidance on the Selection of Low Level Assurance Evaluated Products, April 1996.

Robert Bagwill, The World Wide Web: Managing Security Risks, May 1996.

Barbara Guttman, Information Security Policies for Changing Information Technology Environments, June 1996.

James Foti, Implementation Issues for Cryptography, August 1996.

Barbara Guttman, Generally Accepted System Security Principles (GSSPs): Guidance on Securing Information Technology (IT) Systems, October 1996.

Marianne Swanson, Federal Computer Incident Response Capability (FEDCIRC), November 1996.

PUBLICATION NO.TITLECOST

NIST Handbook 148	DATAPLOT Reference Manual, Volume 1: Commands; Volume II: LET Subcommands and Library Functions, by N. Alan Heckert and James J. Filliben	FREE
NISTIR 5505	A {xi}-Vector Formulation of Anisotropic Phase-Field Models: 3-D Asymptotics By A.A. Wheeler and Geoffrey B. McFadden -- October 1994 PB95-136628	$19.50
NISTIR 5522	Information Technology Engineering and Measurement Model: Adding lane markings to the information superhighway By Marvin Zelkowitz and Barbara Cuthill -- November 1994 -- PB95-143145	$19.50
NISTIR 5530	Mapping Integration Definition for Information Modeling (IDEF1X) Model into CASE Data Interchange Format (CDIF) Transfer File By Igor Simakhodskiy -- November 1994 -- PB95-154670	$25.00
NISTIR 5532	ISDN LAN Bridging By Tim Boland -- November 1994 -- PB95-154696	$19.50
NISTIR 5538	SGML Parser Validation Procedures By Ronald B. Wilson -- January 1995 -- PB95-174959	$19.50
NISTIR 5540	Multi-Agency Certification and Accreditation (C&A) Process: A Worked Example By Ellen Flahavin, Annabelle Lee, and Dawn Wolcott -- December 1994 -- PB95-171955	$21.50
NISTIR 5541	Initial Graphics Exchange Specification (IGES): Procedures for the NIST IGES Validation Test Service By Jacki A. Schneider and Lynne S. Rosenthal -- December 1994 -- PB95-171427	$19.50
NISTIR 5542	Binary Decision Clustering for Neural Network Based Optical Character Recognition By Charles L. Wilson, Patrick J. Grother, and C.S. Barnes -- December 1994 -- PB95-171971	$19.50
NISTIR 5546	A Perspective on Software Engineering Standards By Dolores R. Wallace and Roger J. Martin -- December 1994 -- PB95-171377	$19.50
NISTIR 5557	Lubrication Theory for Reactive Spreading of a Thin Drop By R.J. Braun, Bruce T. Murray, W.J. Boettinger, and Geoffrey B. McFadden -- December 1994 -- PB95-189460	$19.50
NISTIR 5561	ATM Procurement and Usage Guide By Tim Boland -- December 1994 -- PB95-174967	$19.50
NISTIR 5569	The MASPAR MP-1 as a Computer Arithmetic Laboratory By M.A. Anuta, Daniel W. Lozier, and P.R. Turner -- January 1995 -- PB95-178893	$21.50
NISTIR 5570	An Assessment of the DOD Goal Security Architecture (DGSA) for Non-Military Use By Arthur E. Oldehoeft -- November 1994 --PB95-189510	$19.50
NISTIR 5571	Operating Principles of MultiKron II Performance Instrumentation for MIMD Computers By Alan Mink -- December 1994 -- PB95-189486	$19.50
NISTIR 5573	Agile Manufacturing from a Statistical Perspective By R.G. Easterling --October 1995 -- PB96-109525	$19.50
NISTIR 5576	Computer Systems Laboratory Annual Report 1994 By Elizabeth Lennon, Shirley Radack, and Ramona Roach -- February 1995 -- PB95-209920	$25.00
NISTIR 5589	A Study on Hazard Analysis in High Integrity Software Standards and Guidelines By Dolores Wallace -- January 1995 -- PB95-198727	$21.50
NISTIR 5590	Proceedings Report of the International Invitation Workshop on Development Assurance By Patricia Toth -- January 1995 -- PB95-189494	$19.50
NISTIR 5595	Application Software Interface: ISDN Services for an Open Systems Environment By Daniel P. Stokesberry -- February 1995 -- PB96-131487	$19.50
NISTIR 5596	Inserting Line Segments into Triangulations and Tetrahedralizations By Javier Bernal -- March 1995 -- PB95-198933	$19.50
NISTIR 5600	Object-Oriented Technology Research Areas By Dolores R. Wallace -- January 1995 -- PB95-199329	$19.50
NISTIR 5618	An Expression Formatter for Macsyma By Bruce R. Miller -- July 1995 -- PB95-267829	$19.50
NISTIR 5623	An Electronic Implementors' Workshop By Ted Landberg, Robert Bagwill, and Brenda Gray -- March 1995 -- PB95-210936	$19.50
NISTIR 5631	An Analysis of ANSI ASC X12 and UN/EDIFACT Eectronic Data Interchange Standards By Robert Aronoff and Karen Hsing -- April 1995 -- PB95-220554	$19.50
NISTIR 5636	Persistent Object Base System Testing and Evaluation By Eizabeth N. Fong -- April 1995 -- PB95-220588	$21.50
NISTIR 5641	Anisotropy of Interfaces in an Ordered Alloy: A Multiple-Order Parameter Model By R.J. Braun, J.W. Cahn, Geoffrey B. McFadden, and A.A. Wheeler -- April 1995 -- PB96-154570	$19.50
NISTIR 5647	PCASYS -- A Pattern-Level Classification Automation System for Fingerprints By Gerald T. Candela, Patrick J. Grother, Craig I. Watson, R.A. Wilkinson, and Charles L. Wilson -- August 1995 -- PB95-267936	$19.50
NISTIR 5652	Operating Principles of the SBus MultiKron Interface Board By Alan Mink, George G. Nacht, and John K. Antonishek -- May 1995 -- PB95-231783	$19.50
NISTIR 5654	Defining Environment Integration Requirements By Barbara Cuthill and Marvin Zelkowitz -- May 1995 -- PB96-131545	$19.50
NIST GCR 95-670	Standards Policy and Information Infrastructure NIST, Science, Technology and Public Policy Program, Harvard University, and Technology Policy Working Group, Information Infrastructure Task Force -- May 1995 -- PB95-231882	$57.00
NISTIR 5657	An Introduction to the P1003.1g and CPI-C Network Application Programming Interfaces By Karen Olsen -- May 1995 -- PB95-231726	$19.50
NISTIR 5660	Parallel and Serial Implementations of SLI Arithmetic By Daniel W. Lozier and P.R. Turner -- June 1995 -- PB95-252335	$19.50
NISTIR 5677	Center for High Integrity Software System Assurance-Initial Goals and Activities By Dolores Wallace and Marvin Zelkowitz -- June 1995 -- PB95-251674	$19.50
NIST GCR 95-675	Testability of Object-Oriented Systems -- June 1995 -- PB95-242418	$21.50
NISTIR 5687	Method and Evaluation of Character Stroke Preservation on Handprint Recognition By Michael D. Garris -- July 1995 -- PB95-251724	$19.50
NISTIR 5691	Unravel: A CASE Tool to Assist Evaluation of High Integrity Software, Volume 1 and Volume 2 By James R. Lyle, Dolores R. Wallace, James R. Graham, Keith B. Gallagher, Joseph P. Poole, and David W. Binkley -- August 1995 -- PB95-267886 (vol. 1) and PB95-267894 (vol. 2)	$21.50 each
NISTIR 5695	Improving Neural Network Performance for Character and Fingerprint Classification by Altering Network Dynamics By Charles L. Wilson, James L. Blue, and Omid M. Omidvar -- August 1995 -- PB95-267803	$19.50
NISTIR 5696	The Effect of Training Dynamics on Neural Network Performance By Charles L. Wilson, James L. Blue, and Omid M. Omidvar -- August 1995 -- PB95-267845	$19.50
NISTIR 5703	The NIST ATM Network Simulator -- Operation and Programming, Version 1.0 By Nada Golmie, Alfred Koenig, and David Su -- August 1995 -- PB96-106851	$21.50
NISTIR 5708	Electronic Access to Standards on the Information Highway By Sharon J. Laskowski and Venkata V. Ramayya -- August 1995 -- PB96-131578	$19.50
NISTIR 5719	Mapping Integration Definition for Function Modeling (IDEFO) Model into CASE Data Interchange Format (CDIF) Transfer File By Igor Simakhodskiy -- September 1995 -- PB96-109533	$28.00
NISTIR 5724	Error-Bounding in Level-Index Computer Arithmetic By Daniel W. Lozier and P.R. Turner -- October 1995 -- PB96-109582	$14.00
NISTIR 5725	User's Guide for RDA/SQL Validation Tests (Version 1.0) By Joan Sullivan and Kevin G. Brady -- December 1996
NISTIR 5726	Generalized Form Registration Using Structure- Based Techniques By Michael D. Garris and Patrick J. Grother -- April 1996 -- PB96-191374	$19.50
NISTIR 5735	Distributed Systems: Survey of Open Management Approaches By Joseph Hungate and Geraldina Fernandes -- September 1995 -- PB96-128202	$19.50
NISTIR 5736	Comparison of POSIX Open System Environment (OSE) and Open Distributed Processing (ODP) Reference Models By Geraldina Fernandes and Joseph Hungate -- November 1995 -- PB96-131495	$19.50
NISTIR 5737	A Method to Determine a Basis Set of Paths to Perform Program Testing By Joseph Poole -- November 1995 -- PB96-131503	$19.50
NISTIR 5740	Virtual Environments for Health Care By Judi Moline -- November 1995 -- PB96-147814	$21.50
NISTIR 5743	Operating Principles of MultiKron Virtual Counter Performance Instrumentation for MIMD Computers By Alan Mink -- November 1995 -- PB96-131529	$19.50
NISTIR 5757	Sharing Information Via the Internet - An Infoserver Case Study By Robert H. Bagwill -- November 1995 -- PB96-131511	$19.50
NISTIR 5762	Standard Generalized Markup Language Test Suite Evaluation Report By Craig S. Russell -- November 1995 -- PB96-154992	$19.50
NISTIR 5769	C++ in Safety Critical Systems By David W. Binkley -- November 1995 -- PB96-154588	$19.50
NISTIR 5771	Standard for the Exchange of Product model data (STEP): Procedures for NIST STEP Validation By Lynne S. Rosenthal -- November 1995 -- PB96-154976	$19.50
NISTIR 5788	Public Key Infrastructure Invitational Workshop September 28, 1995, MITRE Corporation, McLean, Virginia William E. Burr, Editor -- November 1995 -- PB96-166004	$31.00
NISTIR 5789	Using S-Check Alpha Release 1.0 By Robert Snelick, Nathalie Drouin, and John Antonishek -- February 1996 -- PB96-165965	$21.50
NISTIR 5793	Data Communications Strategy By Jerry Mulvenna and Tim Boland -- January 1996 -- PB96-167846	$21.50
NISTIR 5799	Application of the Pointer State Subgraph to Static Program Slicing By David W. Binkley and James R. Lyle -- March 1996 -- PB96-167838	$19.50
NISTIR 5810	The TMACH Experiment Phase I - Preliminary Developmental Evaluation Ellen Colvin Flahavin -- June 1996 -- PB96-195318	$19.50
NISTIR 5811	Basic Linear Algebra Operations in SLI Arithmetic By M.M. Anuta, Daniel W. Lozier, N. Schabanel, and P.R. Turner -- March 1996 -- PB96-165931	$19.50
NISTIR 5820	Distributed Communication Methods and Role-Based Access Control for Use in Health Care Applications By Joseph Poole, John Barkley, Kevin Brady, Anthony Cincotta, and Wayne Salamon -- April 1996 -- PB96-183165	$25.00
NISTIR 5824	Interoperability Experiments with CORBA and Persistent Object Base Systems By Elizabeth Fong and Deyuan Yang -- April 1996 -- PB96-183140	$21.50
NISTIR 5843	Component-Based Handprint Segmentation Using Adaptive Writing Style Model By Michael D. Garris -- June 1996 -- PB96-193669	$19.50
NISTIR 5848	On the Notion of a {xi}-Vector and a Stress Tensor for a General Class of Anisotropic Diffuse Interface Models By A.A. Wheeler and Geoffrey B. McFadden -- April 1996 -- PB96-193776	$19.50
NISTIR 5854	Computer Systems Laboratory/Computing and Applied Mathematics Laboratory Technical Accomplishments, October 1994 through March 1996 By Elizabeth B. Lennon -- June 1996 -- PB96-193768	$21.50
NISTIR 5859	MV++ v. 1.5A Matrix/Vector Class Reference Guide By Roldan Pozo -- June 1996 -- PB96-195326	$19.50
NISTIR 5860	IML++ v. 1.2 Iterative Methods Library Reference Guide By J. Dongarra, A. Lumsdaine, Roldan Pozo, and Karin A. Remington -- June 1996 -- PB96-195219	$21.50
NISTIR 5861	Sparselib++ v. 1.5 Sparse Matrix Class Library Reference Guide By Roldan Pozo, Karin A. Remington, and A. Lumsdaine -- June 1996 -- PB96-193636	$19.50
NISTIR 5887	A Diffuse-Interface Description of Fluid Systems By Daniel M. Anderson and Geoffrey B. McFadden -- August 1996 -- PB96-210711	$21.50
NISTIR 5889	Experimental Models for Software Diagnosis By Marvin V. Zelkowitz and Dolores R. Wallace -- August 1996 -- PB97-113906	$21.50
NISTIR 5894	Teaching Computers to Read Handprinted Paragraphs By Michael Garris -- September 1996
NISTIR 5916	A Proposed Software Test Service for Special Functions By Daniel W. Lozier -- October 1996
NISTIR 5935	The Matrix Market Exchange Formats: Initial Design By Ronald F. Boisvert, Roldan Pozo, and Karin A. Remington -- December 1996

Danner, Bonnie P.; Ippolito, Laura M.; Wallace, Dolores R.; COMPASS '95 Tenth Annual Conference on Computer Assurance. NIST Journal of Research, September/October 1995.

Garris, M.D.; Blue, J.L.; Candela, G.T.; Dimmick, D.L.; Geist, J.; Grother, P.J.; Janet, S.A.; Wilson, C.L.; Off-Line Handwriting Recognition from Forms. Proceedings of 1995 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, October 1995.

Lobo, C.; Guthrie, W.F.; Kacker, R.; A Study of the Reuse of Plastic Concrete Using Extended Set-Retarding Admixtures. NIST Journal of Research, September/October 1995.

Radack, S.M.; Security and the Internet: The Use of Firewalls. Federation Facts, published by the Federation of Government Information Processing Councils, Fall 1995.

Saltman, R.G.; Electronic Data Interchange and Small- and Medium- Sized Enterprises. Internal paper, Fall 1995.

Laskowski, S.J.; Ramayya, V.V.; Electronic Access to Standards on the Information Highway. World Standards Day Paper Competition, Fall 1995.

Perine, L.A.; In Pursuit of an Optimum: A Conceptual Model for Examining Public Sector Policy Support of Interoperability. Conference on the Interoperability and the Economics of Information Infrastructure, 1995.

Cugini, J.; Dobry, R.; Gligor, V.; Mayfield, T.; Functional Security Criteria for Distributed Systems. Proceedings of the 18th National Information Systems Security Conference, October 1995.

Gilbert, D.; 17th National Computer Security Conference, Baltimore, MD October 11-14, 1994. Proceedings of the 18th National Information Systems Security Conference, October 1995.

Radack, S.M.; Protecting Information in Systems and Networks: An Update on Cryptography Standards. Federal Data Center Issues 1995: A View to the Future; Federal 1995 Information Processing Conference.

Harman, D.; Lab Report Special Section: Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval Group, Information Access and User Interfaces Division, NIST. ACM Press SIGIR Forum, Vol. 29, No. 2, pp. 6-10, Fall 1995.

Carnahan, L.J.; Developing Federal Standards and Accreditations for Data Protection Products. SPIE/IEEE Photonics East '95 Symposium and SPIE-International Society for Optical Engineering, 1995.

Garris, M.D.; Grother, P.J.; Generalized Form Registration Using Structure-Based Techniques. Proceedings of 5th Symposium on Document Analysis and Information Retrieval, 1995.

Wallace, D.R.; Zelkowitz, M.; Center for High Integrity Software System Assurance. Proceedings of 2nd IFAC Workshop on Safety and Reliability, Daytona Beach, FL, November 1995.

Sivathanu, U.R.; Hagwood, C.; Simiu, E.; Exits in Multistable Systems Excited by Coin-Toss Square Wave Dichotomous Noise. Physical Review E, Vol. 52, pp. 4669-4675, November 1995.

Boisvert, R.; Browne, S.; Dongarra, J.; Grosse, E.; Digital Software and Data Repositories for Support of Scientific Computing. Advances in Digital Libraries, Springer-Verlag, New York, NY, pp. 61-72, 1995.

Goldstein, R.E.; Langer, S.A.; Nonlinear Dynamics of Stiff Polymers. Physical Review, 1995.

Rushmeier, H.E.; Ward, G.J.; Lighting, Simulation and Photography: Data, Ideas, and Questions. Proceedings of Right Light III, 1995.

Fill, J.A.; Dobrow, R.P.; The Number of m-ary Search Trees on n Keys. Combinatorics, Probability, and Computing.

Hagwood, R.C.; Technometrics Book Review of Mathematical Analysis of Spectral Orthogonality by John J. Kalivas and Patrick M. Lang. Technometrics Book Review, 1995.

Lozier, D.W.; Turner, P.R.; Parallel and Serial Implementations of SLI Arithmetic. Theoretical Computer Science.

Nimeroff, J.; Dorsey, J.; Rushmeier, H.; A Framework for Global Illumination in Animated Environments. Proceedings of the 1995 Eurographics Rendering Workshop.

Kacker, R.; Zhang, N.F.; Hagwood, C.; Real Time Control of Measurement Uncertainty. Metrologia.

Rushmeier, H.E.; Ward, G.J.; Piatko, C.; Sanders, P.; Rust, B.; Synthetic Images: Some Ideas About Metrics. Proceedings of the 1995 Eurographics Rendering Workshop.

Deprit, A.; L'algebre Symbolique en Mecanique Celeste. Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union Symposium #172.

Carasso, A.S.; Error Bounds in Non-Smooth Image Deblurring. Accepted for publication in SIAM Journal on Mathematical Analysis.

Lozier, D.W.; Turner, P.R.; Error-Bounding in Level-Index Computer Arithmetic. Proceedings of the IMACS-GAMM International Symposium on Numerical Methods and Error-Bounds.

Vangel, M.G.; One-Sided {Beta}-Content Tolerance Limits for Mixed Models with Two Components of Variance, Error-Bounds Technometrics. Lozier, D.W.; Eugene Fiume, An Introduction to Scientific, Symbolic, and Graphical Computation. Book Review for Mathematics of Computation.

Zhang, N.F.; Process Capability Index C^dP^ for Stationary Processes. Journal of Quality Technology.

Braun, R.J.; Cahn, J.W.; McFadden, G.B.; Wheeler, A.A.; Anisotropy of Interfaces in an Ordered Alloy: A Multiple-Order Parameter Model. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Series A.

van Vaerenbergh, S.; Coriell, S.R.; McFadden, G.B.; Murray, B.T.; and Legros, J.C.; Modification of Morphological Stability Threshold by Soret Diffusion. Journal of Crystal Growth 147 pp. 207-214, 1995.

Blue, J.L.; Beichl, I.; Sullivan, F.E.; Faster Monte Carlo Simulations. Physical Review E, 1995.

Alpert, B.; High-Order Quadratures for Integral Operators with Singular Kernels. Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics 60, pp. 367-378, 1995.

Anderson, D.M.; Worster, M.G.; Weakly-Nonlinear Analysis of Convection in a Mushy Layer During the Solidification of Binary Alloys. Journal of Fluid Mechanics 302, pp. 307-331, 1995.

Skeldon, A.C.; McFadden, G.B.; Impey, M.D.; Riley, D.S.; Cliff, K.A.; Wheeler, A.A.; David, S.H.; On Long-Wave Morphological Instabilities in Directional Solidification. IMA Journal of Applied Mathematics 6, p. 639, 1995.

Sekerka, R.F.; Coriell, S.R.; McFadden, G.B.; Stagnant Film Model of the Effect of Natural Convection on the Dendrite Operating State. Journal of Crystal Growth, 154, p. 370, 1995.

Murray, B.; Wheller, A.; Glicksman, M.E.; Simulations of Experimentally Observed Dendritic Growth Behavior using a Phase- Field Model. Journal of Crystal Growth, 154, pp. 386-400, 1995.

Coffey, S.L.; Deprit, A.; Deprit, E.; Frozen Orbits for Satellites Close to an Earth-Like Planet. Celestial Mechanics and Dynamical Astronomy, Vol. 59, pp. 37-72.

Vangel, M.G.; Anderson, D.M.; Richardson's Algorithm and the Approximate Solution of Singular and Inconsistent Matrix Equations. SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications.

Burns, T.J.; Davis, R.W.; Moore, E.F.; Dynamical Systems Approach to Particle Transport Modeling in Dilute Gas-Particle Flows with Application to a Chemical Vapor Deposition Reactor. Journal of Computational Physics.

Ferraiolo, D.; Cugini, J.; Kuhn, D.R.; RBAC: Features and Motivations. Proceedings of the 11th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 1995.

Barkley, J.F.; Implementing Role Based Access Control Using Object Technology. Proceedings of the First ACM Workshop on Role Based Access Control, December 1995.

Ehara, K.; Hagwood, C.R.; Coakley, K.J.; Novel Method to Classify Aerosol Particles According to Their Mass-to-Charge Ratio -- Aerosol Particle Mass Analyzer. Journal of Aerosol Science, Vol. 27, No. 2, pp. 217-234, 1996.

Wilson, C.L.; Blue, J.L.; Omidvar, O.M.; Neurodynamics of Learning and Its Effect on Network Performance. To be published in Journal of Electronic Imaging.

Binkley, D.W.; Lyle, J.R.; Application of the Pointer State Subgraph to Static Program Slicing. Submitted to the Journal of Systems and Software.

Mills, Kevin L.; An Experimental Evaluation of Specification Techniques for Improving Functional Testing. Journal of Software and Systems, January 1996.

Podio, F.; Optical Storage Data Integrity. Imaging and Workflow Conference, National Capitol Chapter of AIIM, February 1996.

Simiu, E.; Heckert, A.; Whalen, T.; Estimates of Hurricane Wind Speeds By the 'Peak Over Thresholds' Method. NIST Technical Note 1416, February 1996.

Golmie, Nada; Su, David; Analysis of the Rate-Based Flow Control Mechanism for Available Bit Rate Traffic in ATM Networks. Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Optical Communications & Networks - OPNET'96, Paris, France, February 27- 28, 1996.

Wilson, C.L.; Grother, P.J.; Barnes, C.S.; Binary Decision Clustering for Neural Network Based OCR. Pattern Recognition, Vol. 29, Issue 3, pp. 425-437, Pergamon Press, March 1996.

Flahavin, E.C.; The TMach Experiment Phase I - Preliminary Development and Evaluation. Submitted to DataPro.

Nielsen, F.H.; Human Behavior -- Another Dimension of Standards- Setting. ACM StandardView, March 1996.

Saunders, B.V.; A Boundary Fitted Grid Generation System for Interface Tracking. Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Numerical Grid Generation in Computational Fluid Dynamics and Related Fields, Starkville, MS, March 31-April 5, 1996.

Pozo, R.; Library Designs for Generic C++ Sparse Matrix Computations of Iterative Methods. Proceedings of the Copper Mountain Conference on Iterative Methods, April 1996.

Radack, S.M.; Katzke, S.W.; Role of the Information Technology Laboratory of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the Development of Standards for Information Technology. Internal paper, April 1996.

Lyle, J.R.; Wallace, D.R.; Using a Program Slicing CASE Tool for Evaluating High Integrity Software Systems. Published on WWW.

Kalisman, A.; McCoy, W.H.; Video Compression Using a Wavelet Transform for Noisy Channels. ACM Wireless Networks (special issue), 1996.

Kim, S-Y.; A Strategy to Support MCS Over Native ATM Service. Proceedings of the IEEE Southeastcon '96 Conference, Tampa, Florida, April 1996.

Oberndorf, P.A.; Cuthill, B.B.; Experiences in Environment Integration with Standards. Proceedings of Software Technology Conference, Salt Lake City, UT, April 1996.

Simiu, E.; Heckert, A.; Extreme Wind Distribution Tails: A 'Peaks Over Threshold' Approach. Journal of Structural Engineering, May 1996.

Linn, R.J.; Using Technology to Manage and Protect Intellectual Property. Proceedings of IMA/Copyright Office Forum [Journal of IMA], 1996.

Beltracchi, L.; Lyle, J.R.; Wallace, D.R.; Using a Program Slicing CASE Tool for Evaluating High Integrity Software Systems. Proceedings of American Nuclear Society Meeting on Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Penn State University, May 1996.

Gass, S.I.; Witzgall, C.; Harary, H.H.; Fitting Circles and Spheres to Coordinate Measuring Machine Data. Proceedings of IFORS Conference, Washington, DC, May 1996. Also submitted to International Journal of Flexible Manufacturing Systems.

Tesoriero, R.; Zelkowitz, M.V.; Measurement of ProcessComplexity. Proceedings of the 7th European Control and Metrics Conference, Wilmslow, UK, May 1996.

Hungate, J.I.; Standardization Role of the Open system Environment Implementors' Workshop. Open System Standards Tracking Report, 1996.

Hecht, H.H.; Wallace, D.; Project Data to Support High Integrity Software Methods. Published on WWW. Also in Proceedings of American Nuclear Society Meeting on Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Penn State University, May 1996.

Binkley, D.W.; Java and C++ in Safety Critical Systems. Computing Systems, The USENIX Technical Journal, 1996.

Newton, J.; Application of Metadata Standards. Proceedings of the 1st IEEE Metadata Conference, May 1996.

Yesha, Y.; Parameter Replacement for CELP Coded Speech in Land Mobile Radio. ACM Wireless Networks Journal, 1996.

Saltman, R.G.; Ready for EDI. Info Security News, May/June 1996.

Garris, M.D.; Dimmick, D.; Form Design for High Accuracy Optical Character Recognition. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Vol. 18, No. 6, pp. 653-656, June 1996.

Mills, Kevin L.; A Knowledge-Based Approach for Automating a Design Method for Concurrent and Real-Time Systems. Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, pp. 529-536, June 10-12, 1996.

Fouquet, Y.A.; Schneeman, R.D.; Cypher, D., Mink, A.; ATM Performance Measurement: Throughput Bottlenecks and Technical Barriers. Proceedings of the International Conference on Telecommunication, Distribution, and Parallelism-TDP96, Toulon, France, June 26-28, 1996.

Lyon, G.E.; Comparing Two Distinct Approaches to Scalability Testing. Proceedings of the International Conference on Telecommunication, Distribution, and Parallelism-TDP96, Toulon, France, June 26-28, 1996. Also published in Calculateurs Parallels.

Fisher, G.E.; CSL View of Applications Portability, Scalability, and Interoperability. ACM StandardView, Vol. 4, No. 2, June 1996.

Hagedorn, J.; Blendell, J.; Vaudin, M.; Rushmeier, H.; A System for Measuring Surface Facet Orientation from Atomic force Microscope Data. Proceedings of the IEEE Visualization '96 Conference.

Flater, D.W.; Generalized Message Passing in a Virtual Reality Application. Journal of Object-Oriented Programming, 1996.

Anuta, M.A.; Lozier, D.W.; Turner, P.R.; The MasPar MP-1 as a Computer Arithmetic Laboratory. NIST Journal of Research, Vol. 101, No. 2, pp. 165-174, 1996.

Orlandini, E.; Stella, A.L.; Einstein, T.L.; Tesi, M.C.; Beichl, I.; Sullivan, F.; Bending Rigidity Driving Transitions and Crumpling Point Scaling of Lattice Vesicles. Physical Review, 1996.

Anderson, D.; Worster, M.G.; A New Oscillatory Instability in a Mushy Layer During the Solidification of Binary Alloy. Journal of Fluid Mechanics 307, pp. 245-267, 1996.

Wakid, S.A.; Radack, S.M.; The National Institute of Standards and Technology: New Directions in Information Technology. Open Systems Standards Tracking Report.

Liggett, W.S.; Measurement for Experimentation. To be published as book chapter in Statistics for Quality.

Hagwood, C.; Levenson, M.; Sivathanu, Y.; Computer Intensive Statistics Using Recursive Discrete Probability Functions. To be published in Journal of the American Statistical Association.

Wheeler, A.; McFadden, G.; Boettinger, W.; Phase-Field Model of a Eutectic Alloy. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series A 452, pp. 495-525, 1996.

Liggett, W.S.; Inn, K.G.W.; Pilot Studies for Improving Sampling Protocols. To be published in Principles of Environmental Sampling (Second Edition).

Zhang, N.F.; Statistical Control Charts for Stationary Process Data. To be published in Technometrics.

Coriell, S.R.; Murray, B.T.; Chernov, A.A.; McFadden, G.B.; Effects of Shear Flow and Anisotropic Kinetics on the Morphological Stability of a Binary Alloy. Met. Mater. Trans., 27A, pp. 687-694, 1996.

Warren, J.A.; Murray, B.T.; Ostwald Ripening and Coalescence of a Binary Alloy in Two Dimensions using a Phase-Field Model. Modeling and Simulation in Materials Science, 4, pp. 1-15, 1996.

Zhang, N.F.; Postek, M.T.; Larrabee, R.D.; Carroll, L.; Keery, W.J.; A New Algorithm for the Measurement of Pitch in Metrology Instruments. Proceedings of SPIE 1996 International Symposium on Microlithography, Santa Clara, CA.

Rust, B.W.; Crosby, F.J.; Global Temperatures, Gaia, and Fossil Fuel Production. Submitted to Global Change Biology, 1996.

Holland, M.; Williams, J.; Coakley, K.; Cooper, J.; Trajectory Simulation of Kinetic Equations for Classical Systems. Quantum Optics.

Zhang, N.F.; Autocorrelation Analysis of Some Linear Transfer Function Models and Its Applications in the Dynamic Process Systems. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 1996.

Rice, J.R.; Boisvert, R.F.; Summary Report on a Workshop: Scalable Scientific Software Libraries and Problem solving Environments. IEEE Computational Science and Engineering.

Beichl, I.; Sullivan, R.; Heaps of Data. Computational Science and Engineering, 1996.

Boisvert, R.F.; Pozo, R.; Remington, K.R.; Barrett, R.; Dongarra, J.; Matrix Market: A Web Resource for Test Matrix Collections. Proceedings of the IFIP Working Conference on the Quality of Numerical Software, Oxford, England, July 8-12, 1996.

Harman, D.K.; Panel: Building and Using Test Collection. Proceedings of the 19th Annual International ACM Press SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, pp. 335-337, Zurich, Switzerland, August 18-22, 1996.

Anuta, M.M.; Lozier, D.W.; Schabanel, N.; Turner, P.R.; Basic Linear Algebra Operations in SLI Arithmetic. Proceedings of the Euro-Par 96, Lyon, France, August 27-29, 1996. [Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science]

Zelkowitz, M.V.; Wallace, D.R.; Models of Software Experimentation. Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering Research Network, Sydney, Australia, August 1996.

Levenson, M.S.; Removing Quantization Noise in Images Using Wavelets. Proceedings of the 1996 Joint Statistical Meeting, Chicago, IL, August 1996.

Liggett, W.; Moon, K.W.; Handwerker, C.; An Experimental Method for Refinement of Solderability Measurement. Circuit World, 1996.

Beichl, I.; Sullivan, F.; Tree-Lookup for Partial Sums or: How Can I Find This Stuff Quickly? IEEE Computational Science and Engineering, Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 13-15, 1996.

Olsen, A.R.; Sedransk, J.; Edwards, D.; Gotway, C.; Liggett, W.; Rathbun, S.; Reckhow, K.; Young, L.; Statistical Issues for Monitoring Ecological and Natural Resources in the United States. Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, 1996.

Leigh, S.; Review of the Book The Pleasures of Probability by Richard Issac. Technometrics.

Podio, F.L.; Digital Optical Tape: Technology and Standardization Issues. Proceedings of the 5th NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Conference on Mass Storage Systems and Technologies, September 1996.

Wheeler, A.A.; McFadden, G.B.; On the Notion of a {xi}-Vector and a Stress Tensor for a General Class of Anisotropic Diffuse Interface Models. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series A.

Lozier, D.; Software Needs in Special Functions. Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics, 1996.

Lawrence, J.; Nonempty Intersections of Convex Sets. Discrete and Computational Geometry, 1996.

Wallace, Dolores R.; Ippolito, Laura M.; Software Verification and Validation, pp. 22-30 of NIST SP 223, to be reprinted in The Journal of the Quality Assurance Institute, October 1996.

Downey, L.L.; Laskowski, S.J.; Buie, E.A.; Hartson, H.R.; Symposium Report -- Usability Engineering: Industry-Government Collaboration for System Effectiveness and Efficiency. SIGCHI Bulletin, ACM Press, Vol. 28, No. 4, pp. 66-67, October 1996.

Vrielink, K.H.J.; Baland, E.C.; Devaney, J.E.; AutoLink: An MPI Library for Sending and Receiving Dynamic Data Structures. University of Minnesota Super Computer Institute International Conference on Parallel Computing, October 3-4, 1996.

Hogan, M.D.; Radack, S.M.; The Quest for Information Technology (IT) Standards for the Global Information Infrastructure (GII). To be published in the ANSI Reporter.

Abdel-Wahab, H.; Kvande, B.; Nanjangud, S.; Kim, O.; Favreau, J.P.; Using Java for Multimedia Collaborative Applications. Proceedings of PROMS 96, October 1996.

Burr, W.E.; Nazario, N.A.; Polk, W.T.; A Proposed Federal PKI Using X.509 V3 Certificates. Proceedings of the 19th National Information Systems Security Conference, Baltimore, Maryland, October 1996.

Carnahan, L.; Guttman, B.; Security Issues for Telecommuting. Proceedings of the 19th National Information Systems Security Conference, Baltimore, Maryland, October 1996.

Flahavin, E.; Snouffer, S.; The Certification of the Interim Key Escrow System. Proceedings of the 19th National Information Systems Security Conference, Baltimore, Maryland, October 1996. Nazario, N.A.; Security Policies for the Federal Public Key Infrastructure. Proceedings of the 19th National Information Systems Security Conference, Baltimore, Maryland, October 1996.

Nazario, N.A.; Burr, W.E.; Polk, W.T.; Management Model for the Federal Public Key Infrastructure. Proceedings of the 19th National Information Systems Security Conference, Baltimore, Maryland, October 1996.

Swanson, M.; U.S. Government-Wide Incident Response Capability. Proceedings of the 19th National Information Systems Security Conference, Baltimore, Maryland, October 1996.

Wilson, M.; Marketing and Implementing Computer Security. Proceedings of the 19th National Information Systems Security Conference, Baltimore, Maryland, October 1996.

Anderson, D.M.; McFadden, G.B.; A Diffuse-Interface Description of Fluid Systems. Physics of Fluids.

Beichl, I.; Sullivan, F.; Making Connections. IEEE Computational Science and Engineering.

Mitchell, W.F.; The Full Domain Partition Approach to Distributing Adaptive Grids. Applied Numerical Mathematics.

Devaney, J.E.; Hagedorn, J.G.; Transforming a MIMD Hardware Environment into a SIMD Programming Environment. Proceedings of the 6th Symposium: Frontiers of Massively Parallel Computation, Annapolis, Maryland, October 27-31, 1996.

Fisher, W.M.; Factors Affecting Recognition Error Rate. Proceedings of 1996 ARPA Speech Recognition Workshop.

Gallagher, K.B.; Visual Impact Analysis. Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance '96, Monterey, California, November 5-8, 1996.

Cugini, J.; Piatko, C.; Laskowski, S.; Interactive 3-D Visualization for Document Retrieval. Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, Workshop on New Paradigms in Information Visualization and Manipulation, November 16, 1996.

Lipman, R.; Devaney, J.; WebSubmit - Running Supercomputer Applications via the Web. Supercomputing 96, Poster Exhibit, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, November 17-22, 1996.

Ferraiolo, K.; Ippolito, L.M.; Conference Report: COMPASS '96, The Eleventh Annual Conference on Computer Assurance. NIST Journal of Research, November/December 1996.

Willis, J.; Wilsey, P.A.; Peterson, G.D.; Hines, H.; Dashiel, W.H.; Semi-Automated Validation of VHDL and Related Languages. Proceedings of VIUF Conference, Fall 1996.

Kuhn, R.D.; Sources of Failure in the Public Switched Telephone Network. Accepted for publication in IEEE COMPUTER.

Lozier, D.W.; A Proposed Software Test Service for Special Functions. Proceedings of the IFIP Working Conference on the Quality of Numerical Software: Assessment and Enhancement.

Zelkowitz, M.V.; Wallace, D.; Experimental Models of Computer Research. COMPUTER, IEEE Computer Society.

Paek, E.G.; Optical Pattern Recognition Using Microlasers. Book chapter in Optical Pattern Recognition.

Brady, M.; Rosenthal, L.; Interactive Conformance Testing for VRML. Proceedings of the 2nd Annual Symposium on Virtual Reality Modeling Language, 1997.

Ressler, S.; Wang, Q.; Bodarsky, S.; Sheppard, C.; Seidman, G.; Using VRML to Access Manufacturing Data. Proceedings of the 2nd Annual Symposium on Virtual Reality Modeling Language, 1997.

Seidman, G.; Extension Nodes to Facilitate VRML User Interface Development. Proceedings of the 2nd Annual Symposium on Virtual Reality Modeling Language, 1997.

Wilson, C.L.; Blue, J.L., Omidvar, O.M.; The Effect of Training Dynamics on Neural Network Performance. Accepted for publication in Neural Networks, 1997.

Wallace, Dolores R.; Ippolito, Laura M.; Verifying and Validating Software Requirements Specifications. Software Requirements Engineering, Second Edition, IEEE Computer Society Press, January 1997.

Garris, M.D.; Omidvar, O.M.; Blue, J.L.; Candela, G.T.; Dimmick, D.L.; Geist, J.; Grother, P.J.; Janet, S.A.; and Wilson, C.L.; Design of a Handprint Recognition System. Accepted for publication in the Journal of Electronic Imaging, 1997.

Grother, P.J.; Candela, G.T.; Blue, J.L.; Fast Implementations of Nearest Neighbor Classifiers. Accepted for publication in Pattern Recognition, 1997.

Rehm, R.G.; McGrattan, K.B.; Baum, H.R.; Cassel, K.W.; Transport by Gravity Currents in Building Fires. Proceedings of the Fifth International Symposium on Fire Safety Science, Melbourne, Australia, March 1997.

Barkley, J.F.; Cincotta, A.V.; Ferraiolo, D.F.; Kuhn, D.R.; Role Based Access Control in Large Networked Applications. Proceedings of the High Performance Networks Conference, New York, NY, April 1997.

In 1996, our organization sponsored, cosponsored, and conducted many conferences, workshops, lectures, and training seminars:

Annual conferences and ongoing workshops

COMPASS, Conference on Computer Assurance
Data Administration Management (DAMA) Symposium
Federal Information Systems Security Educators Association (FISSEA) Conference
Federal Wireless User's Forum (FWUF)
Open System Environment (OSE) Implementors' Workshop (OIW) (now sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society)
National Information Systems Security Conference
North American ISDN Users' Forum (NIUF)
Text Retrieval Conference (TREC)

Specialized conferences and workshops

Army Conference on Applied Statistics
Conference on Leveraging Cyberspace (cosponsored by the White House National Economic Council and Xerox PARC)
Electronic Commerce Seminar: Global Marketplace for Small and Medium Enterprises
Export Criteria for Software Key Escrow Encryption
Interoperability and Testing Demonstration of Multimedia Teleconferencing
Invitational Workshop on Computer Vulnerability Data Sharing
Invitational Workshop on Information Technology (IT) Security
Joint Research Conference on Statistics in Quality, Industry, and Technology
Techniques and Tools for Government Information Technology Services
Technologies to Improve Your Software
Training for the Future
Workshop on Cryptographic Applications Program Interfaces
Workshop on Error, Fault, Failure Project
Workshop on Mugshot and Facial Image Standards
Workshop on Quality, Measurement Assurance, and Uncertainty Analysis
Workshop on Role-Based Access Control
Worldwide Electronic Commerce: Law, Policy, Security, and Controls Conference
Symposium on Usability Engineering: Industry-Government Collaboration for System Effectiveness and Efficiency

Lectures

Applied & Computational Mathematics Division Colloquium Series
CAML Laboratory Seminars
Compression Algorithm Group Lecture Series
Digital Video Lecture
High Integrity Systems Lecture Series
High Performance Computing Lecture Series
Information Technology Seminar
Lecture on Optical Pattern Recognition and Neural Nets
Lecture on Supporting Interactive Information Retrieval through Multivariate Anomalies: Computer Security Applications
Relevance Feedback: A Study of End-Users
Research Agenda for User-Centered Collaborative Engineering
Statistical Engineering Division Seminars

Training courses

Analysis of Variance
Arithmetic Operations in Level-Index Arithmetic
Connecting to the Internet Securely
Computer Algebra Course: Maple and Mathematics--Some Examples
Creating an Incident Handling Capability
Distributed Computing & Information Services
Eudora Training
Fortran 90 Programming for Fortran 77 Programmers
Information Systems Security...And You
Introduction to AVS5, AVS/EXPRESS, and IBM Data Explorer
Introduction to C and C++ for Scientists and Engineers
Introduction to Data Compression
Introduction to Error Correction Codes
Introduction to PV-WAVE
Introduction to Visual C++4 and the Microsoft Foundation Class Library
Macintosh Users Group
Programming in Fortran 90
Regression Models
Statistical Design of Experiments
Synchronize Training
Time Series Analysis

http://www.itl.nist.gov

COMPUTER SECURITY RESOURCE CLEARINGHOUSE

Internet Access

To access the clearinghouse via an http client, use the following Uniform Resource Locator (URL):

http://csrc.nist.gov

To connect via gopher and ftp, use the following:

gopher csrc.nist.gov
ftp csrc.nist.gov

To download CSRC files, Internet users can use ftp as follows:

Type ftp csrc.nist.gov
Login to account anonymous, using Internet email address as the password. CSRC files are located in directory pub.

For information on the Cryptographic Module Validation Program:

http://csrc.nist.gov/cryptval/

GUIDE TO AVAILABLE MATHEMATICAL SOFTWARE (GAMS)

http://gams.nist.gov/

NIST GAMS is an electronic resource which provides a cross-index and virtual repository of mathematical and statistical software components of use in computational science and engineering. Using the mathematical software cross index, you can search for software according to:

what problem it solves
package name
module name
text in module abstracts

The Web site provides background information on GAMS, including a project summary, a glossary of terms, repositories indexed, references, credits and disclaimers, and news items. The server also plays host to a variety of other NIST projects related to applied mathematics and statistics.

NORTH AMERICAN INTEGRATED SERVICES DIGITAL NETWORK (ISDN) USERS' FORUM (NIUF)

To access the NIUF Home Page, use the following URL:

http://www.niuf.nist.gov/misc/niuf.html

STANDARD REFERENCE DATABASES

NIST Special Databases

To order NIST Special Databases or NIST Special Software, write or call NIST Standard Reference Data Program, Building 820, Room 113, Gaithersburg, MD 20899, telephone (301) 975-2208; fax (301) 926-0416; email SRDATA@enh.nist.gov

Special Database 1
NIST Binary Images of Printed Digits, Alphas, and Text $895

Special Database 2
NIST Structured Forms Reference Set of Binary Images (SFRS) $250

Special Database 4
NIST 8-Bit Gray Scale Images of Fingerprint Image Groups $250

Special Database 6
NIST Structured Forms Reference Set of Binary Images II $250

Special Database 8
NIST Machine-Print Database of Gray Scale and Binary Images $1895

Special Database 9
NIST 8-Bit Gray Scale Images of Mated Fingerprint Card Pairs (Volumes 1-5) $750 each

Special Database 10
NIST Supplemental Fingerprint Card Data $750

Special Database 11
NIST Census Miniform Training Database 1: Binary Images from Microfilm $1000

Special Database 12
NIST Census Miniform Training Database 2: Binary Images from Paper and Microfilm $1000

Special Database 13
NIST Census Miniform Test Database: Binary Images from Paper and Microfilm $1000

Special Database 14
NIST Mated Fingerprint Card Pairs 2 $750

Special Database 18
NIST Mugshot Identification Database (MID) $750

Special Database 19
NIST Handprinted Forms and Characters Database $895

Special Database 20
NIST Scientific and Technical Document Database $1000

NIST Special Software

Special Software 1
NIST Scoring Package Release 1.0 $1150

VALIDATED PRODUCTS

The Validated Products List (VPL) lists products that have been validated for conformance to Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) for programming languages, database language, computer graphics, operating systems, Open Systems Interconnection, and computer security. It also provides information about NIST's conformance testing programs regarding points of contact, testing procedures, test suites, testing laboratories, and product test reports.

ftp://speckle.ncsl.nist.gov/vpl/intro.htm

For users without access to Web browsers, the programming and database languages product lists are available on the Internet via FTP as follows:

Type: ftp speckle.ncsl.nist.gov
Login as user ftp
Type your e-mail address preceded by a dash (-) as the password
Type: cd vpl
Type: cd test_files
Type: get followed by the name of the file you want, (e.g., get cobol)

For more information, contact:

Information Technology Laboratory
National Institute of Standards and Technology
Building 225, Room A216
Gaithersburg, MD 20899-0001

Telephone: (301) 975-2900
Facsimile: (301) 840-1357
Email: itlab@nist.gov

Elizabeth B. Lennon, Writer/Editor
Bessmarie A. Young, Cover Design
Kathie Koenig Simon, Photographer
Don Price, Production
Warren F. Overman, Printing Coordinator

References to specific commercial products or brands is for information purposes only; no endorsement or recommendation by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, explicit or implicit, is intended or implied.

January 1997